Curious Graves - Captain Jones' Leg

Twenty-seven states in America have a town or a city named Washington, and until a few months ago I never knew that New Hampshire was part of that list. If we hadn't been on the hunt for a particular gravestone recently I would still be ignorant of that piece of trivia.

The grave we were looking for belonged to Captain Samuel Jones, a man who moved to the rural town of Washington, NH in the year 1800. Various accounts describe that in 1804 Jones was helping to move a building when an accident occurred. (The fact that two hundred years ago people were moving a building without heavy equipment is something these other authors took in stride, but I'll get my head around that one another day.) During this relocation Jones' leg became pinned between the building and a fence, mangling it so badly he had to have it amputated.

Captain Jones then did what any reasonable person would do with a limb they'd lost in a violent accident, he held a funeral for it and buried it in the town's graveyard.

We went searching for this gravestone knowing only that it was somewhere in the town of Washington. Being such a small place - population just over 2,000 - there weren't many cemeteries to deal with, so our master plan was simply to drive into town and begin searching each cemetery row by row. The only specific clue we had was that if you stood at Captain Jones gravestone and looked up you would see a large ball gravestone on top of the hill, with the punchline being that the ball gravestone is the plot-marker for the Ball family grave.

It wasn't until the third and final cemetery that we found the Ball gravestone, and we thanked them for the laugh.

With the last name Ball, what else would you choose for a gravestone?

But we still didn't find the Capt. Jones' grave, and worrying it was turning out to be a myth I began convincing myself that the Ball's gravestone had still been worth making the drive for. There were farther away sections of this cemetery, though - as in across the road and down the street, beyond where it was supposedly located - but going all in with our search we spread out to cover them as well.

It was there that I stumbled across this smaller stone, and it had me at "Capt."

We later realized that the author we'd been relying on had never visited the site himself, because Jones' gravestone and the Ball family gravestone are nowhere in sight of each other. That was okay though, half the joy has always been in hunting these treasures out the hard way. My excitement from seeing it after two hours of searching was far greater than it would have been if I'd simply strolled up to it by GPS. After taking turns posing and chuckling over the fact that it actually does exist, Tina and I had a very satisfying 90 minute drive home.

Yes, we drove a 3-hour round trip to find this gravestone

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Curious Graves - Persecuted For Wearing The Beard