Historic Beebe Monument honoring the lives of three young sisters repaired on Star Island

STAR ISLAND, NH – Just as the summer season was unfurling at The Isles of Shoals, fourth graders on a field trip were exploring a Civil War era gravesite in a sunken grove by Star Island’s southern ledges. Three young sisters who died within weeks of each other in 1863 are buried there, and the students, pressing their ears to the ground at the foot of a cracked obelisk memorial, listened to hear if the girls were whispering to each other.

For well over a century, the tragic story of Rev. and Mrs. George Beebe’s young daughters has captured the hearts and imaginations of those who come across the small, isolated and overgrown family plot. The girls, Mitty, 7, Millie, 4, and Jessie, 2, died not long after Mitty, who had been going to school on the mainland, brought a deadly epidemic – historians say either scarlet fever or diphtheria - home with her to Star Island.

The fishing village the Beebe’s lived in, Gosport, is gone now, and the island is a summer resort with the Victorian-era Oceanic Hotel as its centerpiece. While visitors flock there at this time of year to attend conferences on topics including history, art and spirituality, the opening of the 2023 season found those themes coming to life in the Beebe cemetery as an unusual project unfolded.

The Beebe cemetery is dilapidated, described by historians over the decades as “pathetic” and “the most forlorn graves in NH.” The obelisk monument bearing the girls’ names and epithets is cracked across the center. To its left rest three tiny tombstones, one for each child. They are not much bigger than shoe boxes and sit askew on their foundations like tousled bookends.

Visitors to the graves must descend a steep rock ledge. The lilacs, peonies, and yarrow bordering the site are flanked by thorny thistle and poison ivy. Yet the Beebe cemetery has become a sacred space, one that serves the journey of the dead and the living. People come here to mourn their own children, to reflect on the toll of epidemics, to ponder death and relationships with the living and, like the students on the field trip, imagine what it was like to be these girls, then and now.

During the longest days of the year, a small band of volunteers organized by The Isles of Shoals Historic and Research Association, a.k.a. ISHRA, lugged mortar, water buckets, tools and a massive tripod dubbed “Little Tim” to the Beebe plot to restore the stones. They were led by TaMara Conde from Historic Gravestone Services in New Salem, Mass.

Conde has been repairing gravestones throughout the country for 25 years. She volunteered her labor for this project. ISHRA, the Isles of Shoals Association Unitarian Universalist, and Star Island Corp., which owns the island and the hotel, covered Conde’s room, board and expenses for materials. ISHRA also invested sweat equity by providing volunteers.

The group, numbering just under a dozen, worked for three days, under tarps, with scrub brushes and shovels. All the memorial stones were removed from their foundations and washed with environmentally safe cleansers. Worn epitaphs became clearer.

Millie's reads, "Dying she kneeled down and prayed ‘Please Jesus, take me up to the Lighted Place.’ And He did."

Mitty passed away 11 days later. Hers says, "I don't want to die, but I'll do just as Jesus wants me to.”

And Jessie’s, once considered illegible, now appears to read, “You are dear child, far far away. Yet near in spirit too. Welcome indeed will be the day That brings us all to you.”

Judi Trainor, a gravestone scholar from Plymouth, Mass., was one of the ISHRA volunteers. She said there are multiple reasons to value gravestone restoration: to honor deeply personal and important tributes that memorialize individuals, to preserve history and folk art, and for the critical role they play in researching genealogies.

Trainor’s specialty is inscriptions and fleshing out the stories she finds in the stones.

“You learn a lot about a society from its gravestones” she said. Everything from how they remember their dead, to what they thought of life, to the evolution of technology.

“Old stones were engraved with death skulls and the message, ‘You will die too,’” Trainor said. “Today’s stones have pictures etched on them from computerized lasers.”

Honoring the dead

While leading the restoration process, Conde would occasionally address the three Beebe girls, especially when making a big transition, like removing the top part of the obelisk with a looming tripod to apply mortar. She explained that she is alerting their spirits. Sometimes she would ask for the sisters’ assistance. In the end, she thanked them.

While many people believe acts of kindness can ripple across this world and touch someone far away, Conde said she likes to believe they can ripple from this world to another world.

As she applied a shade of mortar that did not precisely match the monument’s color, Conde told volunteers she was not trying to recreate the original obelisk. The repair should be clear so it can be documented as part of the stone’s history, she explained.

The volunteers’ conversation turned to Zen Buddhism and the practice of coaxing beauty out of unexpected places, from a broken teacup to upended plans.

“As my Japanese friend would say, ‘Too perfect, no good,” Conde said – a reference to the Japanese art of Kintsugi that transforms broken pieces into a new object where the mended cracks become part of its history and enhance its beauty. It is a metaphor for embracing one’s flaws and imperfections.

So it is that the Beebe monument now stands, newly scrubbed, cracks mended, and wearing its scars - as we all do.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Historic Beebe Monument repaired on Star Island