New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Baby Annie’s marker replaced
Evergreen Cemetery ceremony to celebrate effort
NEW HAVEN — Oliver Winchester made his fortune, and was one of New Haven’s largest employers, as founder of the Winchester Repeating Arms Co., maker of lever-action rifles that became a staple of the American West.
His granddaughter, Annie Pardee Winchester, was born June 15, 1866, within a month of when Oliver Winchester founded his company. But she lived barely longer than five weeks before dying of marasmus, a disease in which the body cannot digest protein, according to Janan Boehme, house historian of the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, which was created by Annie’s mother, Sarah Pardee Winchester.
“She starved to death, basically,” Boehme said of Annie’s tragic death, probably on July 24, although the date is not certain. Annie’s misfortune was compounded almost 150 years later when someone stole the small marble cross that marked her grave in Evergreen Cemetery.
However, through a crosscountry effort, Baby Annie’s gravestone has been replaced. A restoration ceremony will be held Saturday to celebrate the project.
“The cross went missing in October of 2015. … During my daily rounds we saw it was missing,” said Dale J. Fiore, general manager of the cemetery at 769 Ella T. Grasso Blvd. “We thought that maybe somebody smashed it or vandalized it.”
Fiore and his employees searched the grounds and nearby pond, but the cross was gone. “Funerary art is a big loss for the entire industry,” Fiore said. “Artifacts are being stolen” and sold, though Annie Winchester’s 2-foot-high cross is the only loss Evergreen has suffered, he said.
The project to restore the grave marker was inspired by Winchester fans from thousands of miles away — Tammy Schoolie of San Jose and Sarah Harvey of Calgary, Alberta, a former San Jose resident.
Both had come to New Haven and noticed the missing marker.
Oliver Winchester’s son, William Wirt Winchester, died in 1881 at age 43 of tuberculosis, a year after his father’s death. Sarah Winchester and several sisters then moved to San Jose. She bought an eightroom farmhouse and continued the couple’s hobby of building and restoring homes, Boehme said. (The Winchester mansion on Prospect Street in New Haven is now the site of the Yale Divinity School.)
The San Jose mansion is now the Winchester Mystery House, “the No. 1 tourist attraction here in San Jose,” said Schoolie, who has visited the house since she was a child. It’s a place of legend. One, according to Schoolie, was that Sarah Winchester “was told by a medium to … move out West and continue to build, to house the spirits of all the people who were killed by the Winchester rifle.”
Boehme said that, while the legends can’t be verified, “she could have believed in spiritualism. We don’t have any documentation that they did, but it was really common at the time.” The late 1800s were a time of loss, Boehme said, with many women made widows by the Civil War and children lost to disease. Contacting the dead was not uncommon.
“She was actually a very intelligent woman, a good businesswoman, a very philanthropic leader. She was a really good person,” Boehme said of Sarah Winchester, who Boehme said continued to subscribe to the New Haven Register and New York Herald after her move out West. Helen Mirren played her in the film “Winchester,” released in February.
Donations raised to replace marker
Last year, Schoolie and her husband were on a road trip and, according to Schoolie, “I said to my husband, ‘We’re going to stop at this cemetery because there’s this famous person who’s buried there.’ … We found out that the cross wasn’t there for Baby Annie. I told my husband, ‘I’m going to do a good deed. Let’s get this gravestone replaced.’ I got about $1,300 in donations.”
Harvey, who could not be reached for this story, also had visited the grave and asked Fiore about the missing cross. She donated $200 to the restoration fund, Fiore said, and the cemetery association’s insurance agent, Brown & Brown of Connecticut, added $900 because an employee’s mother had worked at Winchester. Evergreen added $600 to bring the total collection to $3,000, Fiore said.
“I felt that we have somewhat of an obligation,” he said. “This is part of New Haven history, to repair, replace or restore this monument.”
“We contracted with Nolan Hamden Monuments to design and have the cross produced. It had to come from China,” as does most marble for grave markers because of the cost, Fiore said.
The cross, “with some twining ivy on it,” Fiore said, and the name “Baby Annie” across the base, is a reproduction of the original.
Winchester a world-renowned company
Oliver Winchester, who is buried with his wife a little way down the road from his son, daughter-inlaw and granddaughter, helped “put New Haven on the map,” according to Jason Bischoff-Wurstle, director of photo archives at the New Haven Museum .
Winchester bought the rifle manufacturer in 1855 “when it was basically bankrupt and known as Volcanic Arms,” BischoffWurstle said. “Winchester Arms was the first kind of world-class, knownaround-the-world industry that put New Haven on the map that way.
“He only owned the company for a relatively short time, too, but his practices and the company’s practices were relatively progressive,” Bischoff-Wurstle said. With the end of the Civil War “and westward expansion, so many people bought these high-tech guns and that’s what led to the good fortune of the company,” he said. Winchester died in 1880. Burial place of the famous
Evergreen, with 85,000 graves on its 85 acres and room for thousands more, is home to numerous prominent — or simply interesting — people from New Haven’s history, including Edward Bouchet, the first black man to earn a doctorate at Yale University, five governors, including Wilbur Cross, Louis Lassen, reputed creator of the hamburger sandwich, New York Yankees General Manager George Weiss, Sarah Boone , an African-American inventor who received a patent for the ironing board, and William Chester Minor.
“He’s my favorite,” Fiore said. “He was a Civil War surgeon, contributed to the Oxford English Dictionary” and then went insane and killed a worker in the asylum.
“The magnates of New Haven are all here,” Fiore said. “They’re not at Grove Street,” the historic cemetery in the midst of Yale University.
Fiore, who has been at Evergreen for 32 years, holds lantern tours in the fall, but said, “Because we’re so progressive I don’t promote the ghoulish stuff. It’s not right. … We bury all of the people in the Greater New Haven community. We have an active crematory.”
Evergreen is “one of the few cemeteries that has an active website,” Fiore said. “We have a free app that will GPS you to the grave.”
Schoolie will be among those attending Saturday’s ceremony, which will be held at 11 a.m. at the cemetery. Mirren was invited, but won’t be attending, Fiore said.