AA-2026-F72254
On the image
Someone in the 1950s made a pilgrimage to photograph the gravestone of Mrs. Sarah Bancroft, wife of a Mr. Bancroft, in what is plainly a colonial-era New England burying ground — the scalloped slate markers, the dense crowding of stones, and the dried autumn leaves underfoot all pointing to a churchyard that had been filling up since the eighteenth century. The stone was erected, as it announces with considerable formality, to 'perpetuate the memory' of Mrs. Bancroft, which was the standard ambition of such monuments and which has been working out reasonably well for the two-hundred-odd years since April the twentieth whenever-it-was. Colonial gravestones of this type — carved slate with winged-death or soul-effigy motifs, erected in the decades before and after the Revolution — became serious objects of amateur antiquarian interest in the postwar period, when Americans, newly prosperous and newly curious about their origins, began making weekend drives to document exactly this kind of weathered inscription before it weathered further. The irony is that the stone was erected to prevent forgetting, and the person who came to photograph it already couldn't read half of it.
Visually related — by likeness
Gravestone of Mrs. Sarah Bancroft, Colonial New England Cemetery, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-F72254. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/gravestone-of-mrs-sarah-bancroft-colonial-new-england-cemetery-1950s.
@misc{aaAA2026F72254,
title = {Gravestone of Mrs. Sarah Bancroft, Colonial New England Cemetery, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-F72254},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/gravestone-of-mrs-sarah-bancroft-colonial-new-england-cemetery-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Gravestone of Mrs. Sarah Bancroft, Colonial New England Cemetery, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-F72254 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/gravestone-of-mrs-sarah-bancroft-colonial-new-england-cemetery-1950s ER -
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