Tag: graveyard

The First Person

This headstone marks the remains of Colonel John Sargent, or Sergeant as its spelled here. I found it this morning while looking for someone who is probably one of his descendants, Herbert Wells Sargent. The Locust Ridge Cemetery is still being actively used today, sandwiched on a narrow strip between the freeway and the site of an oil storage facility to be built soon (unless the citizens who are protesting the appearance of an oil storage facility on one of the main streets in town somehow thwart the project). As you walk from one end to the other, it abruptly goes from “relatively recent” to “very old.”

This photo is hard to read especially with the use of the long s, but it says that this stone is 

Sacred to the memory of Colo. John Sergeant who departed this life July the 30th 1798 in the fixty fixth year of his age. Who now lies in the fame town he was born & was the first person Born in the ftate of Vermont.

The epitaph is stern:

lo where this filent marble weeps 

A friend, a father & husband fleeps

He gave them good councel while he had his breath

Advising them to prepair for Death

By “first person” of course we understand that they meant “first European-descended person”, and while we feel bad for that casual disregard for the humanity of the many persons who lived and died here before, we are nonetheless intrigued… can this be true? There are other records and accounts that talk about John Sargent’s birth at Ft. Dummer in 1733. I know that Ft. Dummer (just down the road, although the original site is now flooded by the waters behind the Vernon Dam) was the first “permanent” white settlement in Vermont. However, I can’t easily find any other written account confirming Col. Sargent as the first. 

Presto, I’m a historian!