CHARLES N. SHEPARD

DIED

Nov. 19. 1874.

AE. 55 yrs. 11 mos.

Passing strangers call this not

A place of fear and gloom

We love to linger round this spot

It is our father’s tomb.

The Charles Shepard’s epitaph on his rounded-top white marble tablet of in the Tomb Cemetery in Holden, Penobscot County, Maine, has eroded.  The epitaph is difficult to make out—in fact, I can’t decipher two of the words in the first line.

One of the frsutrations of those who study gravestones is that the soft marble gravestones erode the images and blur the epitpahs.

Two readers deciphered the two blurred words I could not read.  Laurie had read the epitaph on another gravestone and Phyllis had seen a similar epitaph on the gravestone carved for Benjamin Franklin Payne.  Mystery solved!