Nature, abuse imperil a harbor island heritage

Centuries-old hospital graveyard falls prey to the elements, squatters

Researchers used ground-penetrating radar to map out an old cemetery on Rainsford Island. (JONATHAN WIGGS/GLOBE STAFF)

Yellow fever was sweeping through terrified Boston in 1798. The sick - along with their disease-ridden beds, sheets, and belongings - were carried by boat to the rocky, windswept harbor island of Rainsford, where they were left, most likely to die, in the wards of a quarantine hospital. As they perished, hundreds were hastily buried in a nearby field.

Today, hospital ruins lie in the ground like broken teeth, and the graveyard is all but forgotten. Ravaged by wind and driving storms, the ground is slowly eroding, possibly to reveal the remains buried there two centuries ago. Strewn with beer bottles, syringes, and the charred remnants of campfires lit by squatters and weekend revelers, it is also falling victim to human desecration.

"To see what these people are doing is a tragedy, especially with what we have here, sacred ground," Ellen Berkland, the city archeologist, said as she stood near the granite remains of a hospital that once housed patients with smallpox, yellow fever, typhoid, and other catastrophic illnesses.

Berkland and a small team of volunteers are now using ground-penetrating radar to map the cemetery, and they want to alert city authorities to its vulnerability. They hope public awareness will create pressure to honor the forgotten dead from a far less sanitary age.

"The people who lived and died on this island mattered," said Elizabeth Carella, a historian of Rainsford Island. "We would all want the final resting place of our parents and grandparents to be respected. This is a very human story."

Berkland and others who care about Rainsford Island are nearly powerless to protect its burying ground or the overall heritage of a place that served for more than a century as Boston's quarantine stop for all shipping from foreign ports.

There is no regular policing here. Storms are steadily eroding its 11 acres. Illegal camps are erected every year during warmer months despite a ban on public use of the city-owned island, part of the harbor islands national park.

"It's demolition by neglect," Berkland said.

The cemetery is an accident or gruesome surprise waiting to happen, officials fear. Unwitting visitors could fall into a collapsed vault. Continuing erosion could expose bodies in an embarrassing reprise of an incident on Gallops Island several years ago, Berkland said, when red coffins of smallpox victims suddenly resurfaced.

The story of the Rainsford cemetery is intertwined with the earliest history of Boston, when Governor John Winthrop granted Edward Raynsford permission in 1636 to keep cattle on the island. In 1737, Province Hospital was built there to care for the infected, and the following year the Colonial government ordered all ships arriving from foreign lands to anchor off Rainsford.

There, in a cove called Sick Hole, some 6 miles from Boston's shore, the ships would wait before being smoked with brimstone and cleaned with vinegar, a disinfecting process that sometimes took weeks, before their captains received permission to proceed to Boston.

The tales of the island, two small hills connected by a narrow sliver of land, combine the heartache and heroism of a young country struggling with growing pains. Physicians risked infection and death by treating the worst diseases in Boston. The later development of hospitals on the island for paupers, infants, and Civil War veterans showed the progressive side of a maturing society.

In 1739, about 20 slaves sickened during the long journey from Africa were taken to Rainsford to convalesce before being taken to Boston to be sold. From 1895 to 1920, a reform school for boys was established. There, the delinquent and the dangerous were sometimes subjected to cruel and abusive treatment.

"In this island," Carella said, "I see the tension between the place of hope and shelter for the poor and the place where people could be exiled if they were undesirable."

Today, much of the summer activity that occurs on the island is both undesirable and illegal. Homeless get there by boat and camp. Drinking and drug use is prevalent, said Berkland, who occasionally has personally evicted unauthorized visitors who camp in the graveyard. To many of the transients, the small field is simply a pleasant, open space that provides no clues about its former use. All the headstones have long since disappeared on an island that has not been inhabited since the 1920s.

"If you pulled up your kayak, you would have no idea there was a burying ground here," said Allen Gontz, a professor of coastal geology and geophysics at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

As Gontz spoke, he stood on the rocky beach next to a ground-penetrating radar that he and graduate student Christopher Maio dragged across the field, roughly 50 yards wide by 75 yards long. Two test runs last fall showed indications of graves, and the pair returned this week to conduct a daylong survey.

"No one really knows what the bounds of the cemetery are," said Gontz, who volunteered time and equipment for the project.

Once the data are analyzed, city officials will have a better idea of what lies beneath the surface at Rainsford. If Berkland had her way, funding would be found to use the cemetery as one more tool to enlighten and preserve.

"I'd like to educate people about these below-ground resources," Berkland said. "Make them aware of their existence, and put together a plan and a program that considers both the historical and environmental."

She envisions a dignified fence around the cemetery, signs, and walkways.

Similar places with "unmarked human remains can be found over all the islands, and they're very, very fragile," Berkland said. "We need to identify them. This is something that we, as a culture, need to consider collectively. What's going to happen to us, where are we going to go, and how we will be cared for."

For the bodies at Rainsford, in Berkland's view, such recognition would be better late than never.