A Lonely Grave Tells The Tale Of 18th Century Disease And Custom

By Jan Howard

A solitary tombstone marks a grave located just off Route I-84 near Exit 9 in Newtown, about 600 feet east of the Tunnel Road bridge. Once visible from the highway, the grave is now unseen amid the overgrowth of trees and brush.

When the grave was photographed in February of 1963, it was surrounded by a rough log fence that was supported at each of its four corners by smaller logs. The fence still exists but the supports have crumbled and the logs lie on the ground.

When Route I-84 was designed, the road had to be moved from its original path to avoid the lone grave.

The grave is that of Silas Camp, who died of smallpox in 1771. The stone reads: “In memory of Silas Camp who died February 23, 1771, aged 35 years and three months. He died with the small pox, and was buried here.”

The grave has not been totally forgotten, however. For several years, two former residents placed flowers and wreaths on the grave. Recently, someone who visited it has hung rosary beads from the headstone. Nearby, outside of the grave area, a small American flag lies on the ground.

 Smallpox was a dreaded, often fatal illness in 1771. Inoculation against the disease was still in its infancy stages, and many people thought vaccination was not only dangerous but immoral as well.

 People unfortunate enough to have contracted smallpox were often shunned by friends and members of their families. Victims of the disease were often buried far away from the living. It was believed the contagion could survive death, so burial was often far from towns and houses.

And so it was for Silas Camp, whose solitary grave is testament to those long ago beliefs.

Not much is known about Mr Camp.

 He was born in Newtown. Ezra Johnson, in his book, Newtown 1705-1918, wrote that Mr Camp was descended from Samuel Camp, who settled in Newtown in 1707, and his wife, Rebecca Canfield. Their son, Lemuel, and his wife, Alice Leavenworth, had several children, one of whom, according to town birth records, was Silas Camp, who was born on November 21, 1736. This agrees with Mr Camp’s tombstone, which notes he was 35 years and three months when he died on February 23, 1771. However, Johnson’s book says his father was Joel, son of Lemuel and Alice, who married Ellen Jackson. Lemuel’s son and Silas’ brother, Joel, may have had a son, Silas, whom he named after his brother. A Silas Camp died in Newtown on December 8, 1825, at age 50.

A review of Newtown Congregational Church records indicates a Silas Camp and Mary Sheperd, both of Newtown, were married on July 6, 1757. He and his wife had three children, Emma who married Isaac Barnum, Marietta who married Amos Hard, and Edson, who, according to Johnson, was unmarried. 

Beyond these few facts, there are also two references to Mr Camp in Johnson’s history.

In 1753, Mr Camp was appointed, along with Vincent Stillson, Abiel Botsford, and Josiah Bardslee, to impound all swine older than two months found on the commons “after the 28th day of March, except they be well ringed, giving notice to the owner of the swine, within 12 hours of their being impounded, said vote being for better protection of the sheep.”

In addition, the name of Silas Camp is found on a list of the town’s taxpayers of Newtown in 1767 with the amount of his ratable estate.

In the March 1, 1963 issue of The Newtown Bee, in a letter to the editor, Mrs Bessie D. Nichols offered her recollections of the grave of Silas Camp.

She wrote that she had been told stories about the smallpox scare and the gravestone by members of the Nichols, Peck, Dikeman, Camp and Blackman families who lived in the neighborhood about a quarter of a mile from Silas Camp’s house. The gravestone was located off what was then known as the Old Hawleyville Road.

According to Mrs Nichols, members of those families in 1771 had carried food to the stricken Camp family in baskets, which they left on a bank outside the house. Later, a member of the family would go out and pick up the baskets.

Mr Camp’s house later burned down, but according to Mrs Nichols, it was located not far from the Blackman house. Some of the old foundation was still there, she said.

Mrs Nichols also wrote in her letter that Tina and Paula Sedor, who in 1950 were six and three years of age, had come across the tombstone. Their parents told them the story of Silas Camp, she said, and for years afterward the girls raised flowers and took them to the grave.

“The kids went up there all the time. That was their special place to go,” Andrew Sedor, who lives on Currituck Road, said of his daughters. “They always put a wreath on the grave at Christmas.”

Mr Sedor said cows were once pastured in the area, which kept the brush down so the grave was more noticeable from the roadway.

  Tina (Sedor) Benhardt, who was visiting with her father last weekend, spoke fondly of the time she and her sister spent playing on the hill near the gravesite.

“We had many a good time up on the hill,” she said.

“I was probably around seven at the time,” Ms Benhardt said of the day they discovered the grave. “We’d go up there all the time. We would take turns riding our pony, Tony Baloney, up on the hill. There was nothing back there. We often went there with a group of kids.

“Those hills were our playground as it was my father’s,” she said.

“When we found the grave, we ran down to tell our parents. We were so excited to find something. We thought we had discovered it,” she said. Of course, her parents knew about the grave, she said, but pretended they didn’t.  “As we got older, they told us more about it.”

She said at Christmas time they would put a wreath on the grave. “Mommy would make the wreath, and we would trudge up there with it.”

In the summer, they brought flowers for the grave. “We’d go and visit all the time,” Ms Benhardt said. “We’d take our sandwiches and have a picnic there.”

Ms Benhardt said she and her sister continued to put flowers and wreaths on the grave for several years. “We must have been in college when we stopped putting them on,” she said. “We found it again about 15 years ago, but my sister and I couldn’t find it when we looked about five years ago. Father and I drove on the highway, but we couldn’t see it.”

Ms Benhardt suggested that caring for the all but forgotten grave would make a good Eagle Scout project. “It seems like something nice for a Boy Scout troop to do.”

Smallpox

Smallpox has now been eliminated as a result of a successful worldwide vaccination campaign. Vaccination is no longer necessary, and in 1980 the World Health Organization declared the disease officially extinct. Smallpox viruses now exist only in medical laboratories, where they are controlled and maintained for research purposes.

But smallpox was much feared, as shown by Mr Camp’s solitary burial, because it was severe, highly infectious, and often fatal. Prior to vaccination there was no way to control the disease. People who survived it were often left with varying degrees of scarring caused by the smallpox rash.  It is said that Queen Elizabeth I wore heavy makeup to hide marks of the disease.

In 1721 smallpox had created much havoc in Boston and the vicinity. There were nearly 6,000 cases in New England, and about 1,000 deaths.

Lady Mary Wortley Montague, whose son had been inoculated in Constantinople, introduced inoculation for the disease into England about that time. Her daughter was the first person inoculated in England.

Dr Cotton Mather, who had read an account of the inoculation, recommended the physicians of Boston try it. However, no one dared to attempt it except for Dr Zabdiel Boylston, who to show his confidence in its success, began with his own family and continued the inoculations, despite violent opposition.

Pious people denounced it as an interference with the will of God, who they felt had sent smallpox as a punishment for sins, and whose vengeance would be provoked even more.

Other physicians denounced the practice, and many people declared that if any of Dr Boylston’s inoculated patients should die he ought to be tried for murder. An exasperated mob paraded the streets of Boston with halters in their hands, threatening to hang the inoculators, and Dr Boylston’s family was hardly safe in his own house.

The selectmen of Boston opposed inoculation, as did the popular branch of the legislature.

When news arrived of the success of the inoculation on Lady Mary’s daughter, performed the same month that Dr Boylston introduced it in Boston, opposition ceased and inoculation was extensively practiced in the colonies until Edward Jenner developed his vaccine in 1796.

However, it appears that Mr Camp had not been inoculated, and his contraction of the disease led to his death. It wasn’t until the Revolutionary War that inoculation for the disease was practiced in this area.

 

Information for this story was researched in The American Medical Association Family Medical Guide, 1982, and Harper’s Encyclopaedia of United States History, published in 1905.