The gravestone for the first person buried in the First Church’s graveyard stands again.
Samuel Keyes died at 9-weeks-old in 1785, according to the gravestone that was in the basement of the church.
“No one knows how long the stone had been in the basement, but Samuel’s grave may have been one of 16 that were moved when the church built an addition for community activities more than a century ago,” said longtime church member and the church historian George Wardle.
A church member found the stone while scoping the dirt-floored, unlit space under the sanctuary. The stone was in fine shape, said Wardle. And it now stands near the Eliot Street entrance to the Jamaica Plain Burying Ground, third on the right in the row paralleling Eliot Street.
So who was the infant?
Samuel Keyes was probably the son or descendant of John Keyes. John Keyes was one of the original incorporators in 1772 of the Third Parish of Roxbury (now the First Church in Jamaica Plain), said Wardle.
The Keyes family had a house in Jamaica Plain on the southwest corner of South and Keyes Streets. Keyes Street (now McBride Street) was named for John Keyes, who “was a tanner by trade and utilized the water of a brook that flowed through the meadow till it joined Stony Brook.” In 1794, he sold his property to David Stoddard Greenough.
Source: The Founders and Incorporators of the Third Parish: Who They Were and Where They Lived in 1769, by Fred Seaver, March 16, 1917. Printed privately in Jamaica Plain.
