28
��THE GRANITE MONTHLY.
��home of Mr. James K. Story, at or near a point where Aaron Kimball also constructed the first framed house ever built within the limits of the town- ship. Jeremiah Kimball also sustains a prominence in the history of the town by having been the father of Abraham Kimball, the first male child born in the town, who died in Peacham, Vt., in the Syth year of his age, while with his son Isaac.
TWO VETERANS.
Continuing our walk, bearing a little further to the right, till we cross the graveyard entirely, we see a plain white slab, upon which we read the following double inscription :
Joseph Putney
died
Sept. 20, 1846,
JbZ. 93.
��Mary, His wife, died March, 1805, JR. 50. Joseph Putney was a soldier of the Revolution. At Bunker Hill he was enrolled in the company of Captain Isaac Baldwin, of Hillsborough. Capt. Baldwin fell during the fight, and the command devolved upon Lieut. John Hale, of Hopkinton. Joseph Putney is reported to have done other military service in the defence of the northern frontier, but we have no record of it. Subsequently to his career as a soldier, Mr. Putney kept for many years one of the most famous country taverns in all this region, occupying a stand now owned by Mr. Charles Putnam, at the highest point of the highway between the villages of Hopkinton and Con- toocook, on the easterly side. Joseph Putney was of an honest, religious temperament, that warmed to the fer- vor of prophetic zeal. Trotting his young son, Joseph, jr., on his knee, he spoke of the painful struggles of the patriots of the Revolution, and said that the time would come when the people of this country would become selfish and wicked, and fight and kill each other. This fact was related to
��the writer by Joseph Putney, jr., in the dark days of the war of the Rebellion. " Elder Putney," as he was familiarly called, had a second wife, Mary, who died April 12, 1844, aged 82. Her body rests at the left of her husband's, where, upon a plain slab erected in her memory, is this touching but somewhat quaint epitaph :
" Farewell, my friends, I must be gone. My body is at rest ; I am gone my Havior for to see, To be forever blest."
Not far from the northeast angle of this burying-ground is another plain slab, upon which we read that Mr. Thomas
BURNHAM
died June 12, 1823, jE. 68. Mr. Burnham was one of those who are so unfortunate as to leave no spe- cial record of their meritorious deeds. The ensign of our republic that tloats above his grave attests the public recognition of his services as a soldier. Thomas Burnham is reported to have done defensive work, in the days of the Revolution, upon the great watery main, before the United States had an ex- istence, to say nothing of a navy. He was connected with a privateering adventure, under the command of a Captain Leach. He and his wife Ruth, whose body rests by his, came, we think, from some place in the vicinity of Newburyport, Mass., when they settled in Hopkinton, on the hillside, a few rods east of the burying-lot, on the ancient road lead- ing from the top of Putney's hill to the center village of the town. A story runs that when Ruth Burnham, presumably a young wife, left her Massachusetts home to settle in the comparative wilderness of Hopkinton, N. H., she took along a syringa, or lilac bush, to plant by her new dwelling. The shrub flourished, and of it she gave slips to her neighbors, and thus for the first time introduced the floral specimen into this vicinity. Some
�� �
