COLONIAL SAG HARBOR: CLUES IN THE GRAVEYARD

For a student of history, gravestones offer excellent clues about a place's early inhabitants, and particularly so in a village that was once a wealthy shipping port. Sag Harbor's Oakland Cemetery and the Old Burying Ground on Madison Street supply especially rich records written in stone. "Nodal points in the landscape," Dr. Gaynell Stone, director of the Suffolk County Archeological Society and a leading authority on Long Island's oldest grave markers, called them Saturday in a talk before the Sag Harbor Historical Society.

The type of material used for the stone, its shape, the carved decorations, and, of course, names and dates are all indicators of the wealth, social status, and health of the deceased. Sag Harbor did not have its own resident stonecarver early on, and it was common for a sailor to purchase a stone for a family member while on a coastal voyage to Providence, New London, Newport, Boston, or New York.

These distinctive stones show where the ships were trading, information that might otherwise be hard to come by, since log books were often dispensed with for domestic voyages as a way to shelter income.

In 1793, Sag Harbor got its own stonecarvers when Ithuel and Phineas Hill moved here from Connecticut. Business was so good that, according to Dr. Stone, in 1832 Phineas Hill went to Huntington to look for an agent. Hill descendants are still carving stone in Riverhead today.

Gravestones tell of a community's early occupations and wealth. There are more 18th and 19th-century sea captains, for example, buried in Sag Harbor than in any other Long Island cemetery - 32. Their stones speak mutely of the harshness of the occupation, since so many died in their 30s.

It became trendy in the late 1700s to use marble, and marble gravestones are a good indicator of wealth. Those of merchants and doctors are often more sophisticated than others.

Oakland Cemetery, said Dr. Stone, contains more obelisks, tall pillars tapering to pyramids, than any place she has ever seen, another reflection of the wealth of the villagers. The cemetery also has more Masonic symbols than any other on Long Island.

Stonecarvers charged by the letter, and wit somehow got lost when Sag Harbor's Puritan settlers crossed the Atlantic. Original or poetic epitaphs are very rare. A classic East End epitaph, short and to the point, is on Prentis Mulford's gravestone:

"Philosopher 1831-1891. Thoughts are things."

"She was an amiable consort," is a common early epitaph. A colonial wife was often described as a consort. And a relic, no matter what they say now, was the word used to describe a widow. Granite or marble clues about women are, unfortunately, few and far between, because colonial wives' maiden names were not put on their stones, thus erasing much maternal genealogy.

Gravestones are also excellent records of causes of death. Whole families of colonial children buried in the Oakland Cemetery were often lost to the same bout of cholera or smallpox. "A bud on earth will bloom in heaven," is a beautiful epitaph that emotionally recorded the loss of one small child. Some people did not even name a child for 6 months or so until they were certain it would survive.

PAT MUNDUS