The Coffin Man’s calling card

There once was an itinerant stone carver who traveled the dusty roads of upstate New York in a horse-drawn wagon loaded with quarried pieces of sandstone. He was looking for families who had recently buried loved ones, to sell them a headstone for the grave. His “signature” was the coffin shape he would chisel at the base of each headstone. The size, and the number of these coffin shapes would indicate whether the occupant was an adult or a child, and how many rested beneath this headstone.

The headstone in the Sanford Cemetery for George Sands, who died August 8, 1816 at age 83, was so inscribed. There are two coffins at the base; it is not known who the second person might have been.

For decades, the carver remained anonymous, known only as “The Coffin Man.” Researcher Mary Dexter of Cortland became obsessed with locating as many of his stones as she could (she found more than 200 of them over 30 years) and of trying to determine the carver’s name. At last, she discovered, in estate papers of one of his “customers,” a record of payment of $5 for a headstone and footstone to one Jonas W. Stewart.

Stewart, it turns out, came from a family of stone carvers. Father Jonas was a well known carver in the Clermont, NH area. Jonas W. Stewart II was born in Clermont in 1778. J. W. and his brother James followed in their father’s footsteps, but each developed a unique, recognizable carving style, and each staked out stone peddling territories of their own.

The Protestant faith now has numberless denominations, but the roots of Protestantism in the 1500s is truly “Protest” — back then it was against Rome and the Pope, against heirarchies and church corruption, against any barrier between the worshipper and God. All across Europe, but especially in England, wars were fought, blood was shed and clandestine sects were formed as people sought a way to worship outside the Catholic and state-established churches.

Many of the Scots-Irish settlers in our area were such “pilgrims,” seeking a place to worship their own way: strict, yes, but also egalitarian, without arcane structures, or paid ministers — a faith that did not “solicit” or “convert” but wanted only true believers. Like many early Protestant faiths, our original Baptists frowned on “music,” which to them meant instruments. Singing psalms from the Bible, or other “hymns” in unison together, was still part of worship.

Have you ever been to a service — or a concert — where a leader wanted you to sing with them, so they shout out the words first, and then you sing them? This is a long standing church tradition called “Lines Out” or “Lining.” This began in earlier days because some church members could not read. So the song leaders or ministers would call out the words, so everyone could sing to the tune chosen for that hymn.

In Old School Baptist and some other older Protestant sects, this tradition still stands firm. It also remains part of the ritual of folk and other indigineous music concerts. Some early Protestant faiths believed only actual words from the Bible (the Psalms) should be sung; hymns were the religious words, regardless of tunes, and “tune books” were ones that included notes to sing.

There are not many OSB churches left: mostly here, Maine and spots in the South; that tells us that isolation from larger cultural forces helps maintain this “primitive” Baptist tradition. Also that cultures that are naturally “stoic,” and fatalistic might be a more likely home to such a breed of Baptist. Especially a century or so ago, if you sang a hymn, saying you might not see your neighbor next week, you truly knew that could come to pass. A random horse kick, pneumonia, a fire… just look at the front page of this paper any given week from 1902 onwards. Old School Baptists knew whereof of they sang.

The restored Vega OSB Church, now a performance hall owned by the Roxbury Arts Group