Curator ’ s Corner :
sweet auburn | 2022 volume i
Yearly Visit to the Grave of Oliver Wendell Holmes ( 1809-1894 )
By Meg L . Winslow Curator of Historical Collections & Archives
idden away in a Cemetery scrapbook of newspaper clippings from
H the 1920s is a fragile , folded clipping of a story about a young girl named Martine de Pierra from Philadelphia . On August 29 , 1894 , she
experienced a “ kindness she never forgot ,” and since then , made a pilgrimage every year to visit the grave of Oliver Wendell Holmes on the eve of his birthday , honoring his memory with flowers . The clipping tells the story in her own words :
“ Once just a few months before his death , he [ Oliver Wendell Holmes ] went out of his way to be kind to me . It was his birthday and I had journeyed to Beverly Farms to attend one of his famous birthday receptions . It turned out to be the last one , August 29 , 1894 .
Unfortunately I arrived after the party was over , the guests gone . I was a young girl then , and my disappointment was keen . Some member of his family told him about me and he insisted on receiving me and poured my tea with his own hands .
I shall never forget his kindness nor the impression his gentleness made upon me , nor the words he wrote for me on the fly-leaf of one of his books .”
The next summer , Martine came to Boston and placed flowers on his grave .
“ I am a Southerner . My birthplace was Vicksburg , Mississippi , yet I was brought up on the New England poets .”
After she placed roses on the graves on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell , the article concludes ,
“ But she sat longest at the resting place of … Oliver Wendell Holmes – and the reporter left her under the tall oaks that stand guard there , but not before she had repeated the words he had written on the fly-leaf of one of his own book 34 years ago –
“ Oh , let us trust with holy men of old . - Not all the story here begun is told . So the tired spirit waiting to be freed With tranquil eye on life ’ s last pace shall read By the pale glimmer of the torch revered . Not ‘ Finis ’ but the end of volume first .”
21