. Coast watch. Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology. HC. DOCUMENTS APR 4 W7 NORTH CARQUMA rith a little information about tombstones, you can learn some interesting things about a person — or a person's family — without reading the names, dates or epitaphs. The gravemarker can speak volumes in its design. In the mid- to late-1700s, a skull — or death's head — repre- sented a negative, final attitude toward death. An unusual example of one can be found at the grave of Josiah Howard, "A young man of surprising ingenuity," who died in 1759 at age 22.
. Coast watch. Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology. HC. DOCUMENTS APR 4 W7 NORTH CARQUMA rith a little information about tombstones, you can learn some interesting things about a person — or a person's family — without reading the names, dates or epitaphs. The gravemarker can speak volumes in its design. In the mid- to late-1700s, a skull — or death's head — repre- sented a negative, final attitude toward death. An unusual example of one can be found at the grave of Josiah Howard, "A young man of surprising ingenuity," who died in 1759 at age 22. He's buried at the Christ Episcopal Church graveyard in New Bern. The skull was first used on tombstones by New England puritans to symbolize the body's mortality, says M. Ruth Little, an architectural historian and Raleigh- based consultant. In the 1700s, it would have been unseemly for a puritan to expect eternal life, and it would have been offensive for a gravestone to indicate that a person was going to heaven, she says. Such rewards had to be earned. The trends in New England gravestone art extended into coastal North Carolina as people sent away for engraved markers. Because no stone was native to the coast, anyone who wanted a carved marker had to be wealthy enough to order it. Not until the 1830s did anyone in North Carolina carve tombstones commercially, Little says. "Ordinary people didn't have stone markers in eastern North Carolina," she says. "They were within the reach of a very small percentage of ; The gloomy death's head — and views toward death — contin- ued to evolve in the 1700s. Wings were added to the skull to symbol- ize a heaven-bound soul. What Can You Read From a Tombstone? By Jeannie Fans Norris. A cherub eventually replaced the death's head in the late-1700s. The cherubic face still had wings at the ears, and it represented a more hopeful, religious view toward death and resurrection. It can be found in the old
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