Sometime in his Bar Harbor years, Alonzo Ash was chopping his own firewood before dawn one Sunday morning. A neighbor, trying to sleep, complained to the authorities, and Alonzo was charged with violating Maine's Blue Laws, which forbade any work on the Sabbath. He was fined five dollars and thirty-four cents. At trial he told the court that he was poor, and that he could not afford better firewood.
He died in May 1923, at the age of eighty-three, after seventy-five of those years lived in Bar Harbor. He was a wallpaper seller and hanger by trade, and an avowed socialist besides. His grave is not here. His wife is. So are his mother, his father, and three of his children. He outlived almost all of them.
The wallpaper hanger
Alonzo H. Ash was born on the 7th of September, 1839 — the eldest of eight children born to Benjamin Ash and Maria Higgins Ash, a Gouldsboro sea captain and his Mount Desert Island wife who had settled at Bar Harbor only weeks or months before. He lived three quarters of a century in the town his parents had chosen — long enough to see it change from a fishing village to one of the great Gilded Age resorts of the Atlantic coast. He hung paper for a living. He kept socialist politics in a town that was, by his last decades, increasingly the seasonal address of the very people his politics opposed. He died of pneumonia after a long illness.
The Blue Laws conviction is one of the few stories about him that has come down to us — a small case, a small fine, but a revealing one. He had been chopping wood early enough that a neighbor heard him through the bedroom wall, and the case seems to have hinged less on the Sabbath than on the hour. His defense at trial was practical: he was poor, and the wood he could afford was the kind that had to be worked.
Alonzo had a brother named Nathan who chose differently. Nathan Ash, his junior by a decade, was a prominent businessman in town, in the livery trade; at his peak he kept a stable of some hundred and fifty horses, rented out to the summer guests who, by the 1890s, were arriving on Mount Desert Island in carriage-loads. He died of a heart attack before Alonzo did.
Amanda
Amanda M. Richardson, who married Alonzo Ash and who is buried in the plot at Mount Desert Street, came of an island family. Her parents were Amos Richardson and Bethiah Hopkins Richardson — second cousins to each other — both of them buried nearby in the cemetery. Her infant brother, James Small Richardson, lies with them. She also had a sister, Rebekah Richardson, who outlived her.
She bore at least eight children. Her obituary names the seven who survived her: Mrs. Ida Richardson of Southwest Harbor; Mrs. Mamie Emery of Salisbury Cove; Mrs. Charles Bulger; and Barton, Evelina, Alice, and Walter, all of Bar Harbor. The eighth — Israel — had died eleven years before his mother. The plot also holds an infant whose parentage the record does not state with certainty. Of the children she is known to have borne, three rest with her: Israel, Walter, and the infant.
Amanda died on the afternoon of Sunday, the first of November, 1903, at the age of sixty-five, of consumption. She had been ill for a long time. Her obituary in the Bar Harbor Record of November 4th recorded:
Though in poor health for a number of years she never complained but was very helpful to all those about her. She was a kind friend and neighbor and will be deeply mourned by these as well as by her children.
Bar Harbor Record, 4 November 1903
Her funeral was held the following morning, at half past ten, at the Congregational Church.
Walter, who studied pharmacy
Walter R. Ash, the youngest of Alonzo and Amanda's children named in the family record, was born in July of 1883. He was twenty years old when his mother died, and still at home in Bar Harbor. Sometime in the years that followed he went to Boston to study pharmacy, and on his return took a position at Doe's drug store in town. By family report he was a member of the Improved Order of Red Men — a fraternal society whose rituals and regalia were modelled on imagined Native American forms, and which restricted its membership to white men until 1973.
He had not been long back from Boston when he began to fall ill. He moved inland, hoping that a change of climate would help. It did not. He died on the 28th of April, 1907, at the age of twenty-three, less than four years after his mother. He was buried beside her.
Israel, and an infant
Two more children lie in the plot.
Israel H. Ash was born on the 19th of November, 1863, and died on the 11th of August, 1892, at the age of twenty-eight. The sources available here do not record what killed him.
The smallest stone in the plot carries only the name "Infant Ash" and a single date: 23 December 1891. The child was born and died on the same day. Whether the infant was a child of Alonzo and Amanda is not certain — but the date sits within the years of their marriage and child-bearing, and the stone was set down beside theirs.
Maria and Benjamin
Two more Ashes lie in the plot: Alonzo's parents, and the founders of the family's Bar Harbor line.
Benjamin Ash was a sea captain, born in Gouldsboro. Sometime in the 1830s he married Maria Higgins, the daughter of Oliver Higgins and Rhoda Leland Higgins of Mount Desert Island; her maiden name connected the new family to one of the earliest European families on the island. The two of them settled at Bar Harbor in 1838 or 1839 — Benjamin from across the bay, Maria from the Higgins land — and built a family there.
Eight children followed. Alonzo, the eldest, was born in September of 1839. Almira came in 1841; Orlando in 1843; Elizabeth in 1844; Adeline in 1847; Miriam in 1848; Nathan in 1850; and Julia, the youngest, in 1853. All but Benjamin and Maria themselves would live out their lives in Bar Harbor, and most would marry into other island families — the Higginses, the Robertses, the Coopers, the Ellses.
Benjamin died on the 16th of January, 1882, more than four decades after settling on the island. Maria followed him on the 10th of August, 1891, nearly a decade later. They are buried together.
