Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Lives of the Past Informing the Future | Page 17

“Simon Antranighian, in his short life, was a pioneer and deserves to be recognized
and remembered. The Armenian-American community really owes Steve Pinkerton
its thanks for leading the effort to call greater attention to the rich history of
Armenian-Americans at Mount Auburn Cemetery....”
– Marc A. Mamigonian, Director of Academic Affairs
National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR)
St. John’s Lot, Vesper Avenue
According to his Boston death record, Antranighian died
at 2 Crescent Place on March 15, 1855, just 470 days after his
arrival in the United States. His age at death was given as
twenty-seven, though he was actually twenty-eight. The cause
of death was recorded as “Infl. of Lungs,” which could have
been pleurisy, tuberculosis, asthma, pneumonia, or something
else. Respiratory diseases were the most common killer in
cities around the world in the early nineteenth century, and
Boston was no exception. His work as a daguerreotypist would
also have exposed him to toxic chemical vapors, including
mercury fumes.
Crescent Place was a residential cul-de-sac located just
north of Bowdoin Square at what is now a small park on New
Chardon Street across from Bullfinch Place. Antranighian
died there under the care of Drs. Moses C. Greene and Eli
Whitney Blake. He had been cared for “night & day, in his last
illness” by a friend and fellow boarder named Jacob “Balien,”
a fellow Turkish immigrant. Boston immigration records
show that Jacob “Balyan” or “Balayan” arrived in Boston from
“Armenia” on the Sultana on July 20, 1853, age twenty-five.
“Hajob Balian” applied for naturalization in Milton, MA, on
January 17, 1855, listing his occupation as “cracker baker” and
stating that he was born in Constantinople on February 12, 1829.
Antranighian died intestate. Boston attorney Francis
Edward Parker, at that time practicing in partnership with
Richard Henry Dana, Jr., was appointed to administer his
meager estate, valued at $136.80. (Later that spring, Dana
and the prominent African American attorney Robert Morris
would unsuccessfully represent Anthony Burns, a victim of the
1850 Fugitive Slave Act.)
Clipper Bark Sultana
The 452-ton Sultana was built in 1850 by clipper-ship wizard
Donald McKay in his East Boston shipyard. With her smaller
size and simpler rigging, she was classified as a “bark” or
“barque,” able to perform almost as well as a fully rigged ship
but with a smaller crew. Her captain was Charles Watson,
a Dane. Sultana made many trips to and from Smyrna in the
1850s, often carrying American missionaries and Armenian
sympathizers and merchants. The poet James Russell Lowell,
also buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery, sailed on the Sultana
on his first trip to Europe in 1851. One of the passengers with
Antranighian on the 1853 trip was nineteen-year-old Artin
“Hatchadurien,” who was probably a younger brother of the
dentist Sarkis Hachadoorian.
In January 1860, the Sultana was purchased by Boston
merchants Francis Braggiotti and James T. Wood and sailed
from New York for the Congo River under the command of
pirate captain Francis Bowen. She reportedly landed a cargo
of about 1,000 enslaved people in Cuba the following June,
nearly two years after the last shipment of enslaved people to
the United States in 1858. The ship was then burned and sunk
off the coast of Cuba. Braggiotti was born in Smyrna of Italian
parents, immigrated to Boston as sixteen-year-old in 1847,
and became an American citizen in 1853. He appears in 1850s
maritime news reports as the consignee for shipments of fruit
on Sultana. He died in Boston in 1893 and was buried at Mount
Auburn Cemetery on Peony Path, a dozen yards from the
Sphinx monument commemorating the abolition of slavery.
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