A Foote
in the
Grave
By
том глицинии:
We always wondered who Eli Foote
was. His grave in the Dickinson ceme¬
tery at Win ton was at the edge of our
sandlot baseball field and sometimes a
drive to right field would wind up in
the vines that covered the headstones.
Those old cockeyed, lichen-green
stones were some of them older than
the American Revolution and would
have had an intrinsic interest for us even
if there had been no mystery at all about
Eli Foote.
Eli was a loner here because all the
other stones were those of members of
the Dickinson family and their kin. in¬
cluding that of General Joseph F.
Dickinson, a patriarch of our Hertford
county community. The inscription on
Eli’s tombstone did not help much. It
said that he had died at Winton in
August. 1791. aged about 55, and that
he was born in Colchester. Connecticut.
Further than that, as the saying goes,
the deponent saycth not.
Another thing that struck us as odd
was that the Dickinson plot contained
two headstones memorializing the same
person and we wondered why one had
not been enough. In later years, as a
practicing historian. I would find that
two sets of relatives of Mrs. Lavinia
Brickell Dickinson Bunbury had feuded
over what the inscription should record
about her. with the result that both
families ended up erecting stones of
their own choosing. I thought that was
pretty nearly unique and wrote a maga¬
zine article to set forth the circum¬
stances.
Not long afterward I came across a
genealogy of the Foote family of Con¬
necticut and was delighted at the op¬
portunity to find out something more
about our enigmatic Mr. Foote. It ap¬
peared that Eli's family was a promi¬
nent one in New England, his father
having been a well known "professor
of religion" at Colchester. As a young
man lili had moved to Guilford. Con¬
necticut. where he had been a leading
man of affairs and charter member and
master of the Guilford Masonic Lodge.
So far. so good. Then the genealogist
got around to Eli's children by his wife
Roxana Ward Foote, daughter of Gen¬
eral Andrew Ward. Their daughter
Roxana had married, it seems, the Rev.
Lyman Beecher.
Then it hit me. lili Foote was the
grandfather of Harriet Beecher Stowe!
Lest there be any mistaking the point
I visited Guilford not long ago and was
directed to a beautiful area just outside
town known as Nutplains. The ancestral
Foote home of the same name is no
longer there but a short walk down a
wooded lane took me to the Foote
family cemetery nestled among some
trees by a little creek. The plot was
well cared for and some local people-
had recently placed some American
flags around because it was almost the
Fouth of July. In the center was a
considerable obelisk on the base of
which were inscribed names of most
of the family members whose head¬
stones lay nearby and a couple for
whom no graves were evident. One of
these latter was an inscription concern-
ini! Eli Foote, which meant, inciden¬
tally. that he shared with Mrs. Bunbury
the distinction of having two separate
memorials to his death. This one said
that he had passed away in North Caro¬
lina at the age of 44 on September X.
1792. Sure enough. Winton harbored
the remains of the grandsire of the
author of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
What the inscription did not explain
was why Eli’s gravestone at Winton
recorded a different age and date of
death. A subsequent visit to the Hert¬
ford County court house, standing bare¬
ly a hundred yards from Eli’s grave,
provided the answer. One of the few
old wills to have survived two burnings
of the court house is that of General
Dickinson. When he died in 1822 the
general directed his administrators
и»
have a permanent marker placed over
Eli's remains. A lapse of 30 years since
Eli's demise, however, had left memo¬
ries rather hazy and the stone’s in¬
scription would bear testimony to the
fact.
But what was Eli Foote doing in a
place like Winton in the first place?
The answer to this question lies among
the ample records of the Southern His-
Harnct Beecher Stowe
toricul Collection at Chapel Hill which
contains a letter written in 1789 from
aboard a ship in Edenton Bay. The
letter was written by Justin Foote. Eli’s
brother, to a relative in New York. It
recounted their voyage south from New
England on the sloop Harlequin, noted
sadly that trade in Edenton was slow
because of the season (late October)
and indicated their intention to proceed
next day. if the wind was good, to
“Murphys Burrow" (Murfreesboro),
on Meherrin River, "to take up a stand
for the winter." Their object would be
to find salable commodities to exchange
for their New England produce, in¬
cluding hardware and manufactured
goods.
The evidence indicates that the Foote
brothers found a ready market in Hert¬
ford County for Justin was to remain
a resident of the Albemarle region for
several years. In the next season he
sent the Harlequin to Cape Francois
and it returned in the summer of 1791
with a cargo of coffee, molasses, brown
sugar, limes and oranges for local mer¬
chants. Later Ju>tin would return to
Guilford, where he died greatly re¬
spected.
But Eli had come to North Carolina
for good. In the late summer of 1792
he contracted an illness, probably one
of the malarial fevers that periodically
ravaged this area, and died in Septem¬
ber. leaving a widow and ten young
children ir. Guilford. It may have been
the same outbreak of distemper that
( Continued on page 39)
1 5
THE STATE. StPTCMOEO IS. 1966
