Calvin P. Hubbard didn’t have much luck, either in life or in death. Sometime on March 22 or 23, a rip-roaring wind brought down a tall pine on the west side of the Center Cemetery. It toppled eastward and crashed directly onto Hubbard’s marble tombstone, shattering it into three big chunks and several smaller fragments.
Even before the tree fell, nature had been unkind to Hubbard’s stone. Acid rain had eaten at the marble until only his name was clearly legible. The date of his death—was that April 1803? No, 1863. And what were the words above the date? With the light at just the right angle, a reader could see “Killed in …. plosion.” The only possible word seemed to be “explosion.” Another whole line of writing remained illegible.
Hubbard’s broken tombstone awaits repair. (Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz)
The year 1863 and the violent death strongly suggested Hubbard had died in the Civil War. But there was no metal grave marker to show he had served in the Union Army. His name did not appear among the war dead on Harvard’s Civil War memorial. And oddly, there were no other Hubbard graves anywhere around him. His nearest neighbors were Hapgoods, Athertons, Haskells, and Tuckers.
Where did Calvin Hubbard come from? How did he die? And what was he doing in the Harvard cemetery? As it turned out, all the answers were in the Jeff Harris History Room at the Harvard Public Library.
It took Constance McCormack, reference librarian, only a few minutes to locate a Calvin Hubbard in the online vital records for Massachusetts. Calvin Patterson Hubbard was born in Groton in 1826. His father’s name was also Calvin, and his mother’s name was Sally.
The vital records also showed another person with the same parents—Eliza Atherton, born in Groton in 1824 and eventually married to Harvard’s Galen Atherton. So Eliza Hubbard Atherton was Calvin’s sister, less than two years older than he. That explained his presence in the Center Cemetery, next to a plot filled with Athertons. When he was killed at age 37, his sister brought his body here for burial.
But how had he been killed? Some sort of disaster connected to the Civil War still seemed likely. However, a Google search for “explosions April 1863” led not to a battle in Maryland or Virginia, but to a list of ships that sank, blew up, ran aground, or were otherwise destroyed that year.
In April 1863, the most lethal explosion on that list took place in the California harbor of San Pedro, now a part of Los Angeles. Late on the afternoon of April 27, a small steamer, the SS Ada Hancock, was ferrying passengers out through the shallow harbor to a larger ship that would take them to San Francisco. Suddenly the steamboat tilted and cold water washed into the engine room, hitting the hot boiler. The boiler exploded so violently that the whole boat above the waterline was demolished. At least 26 of the 50 or more passengers were killed, and others died later of injuries. Was Calvin Hubbard among them?
Again McCormack’s research skills turned up an answer. Word of the boat’s destruction reached the East quickly by telegraph. But the names of the dead and missing took much longer. More than a month after the accident, The New York Times for May 31, 1863, carried a list of their names. Among those whose bodies had been found and identified shortly after the blast was C.P. Hubbard.
What took Calvin Hubbard all the way across the country from Groton to San Pedro? Did he head west in the gold rush of 1849? Had he joined the Army and served in the Mexican-American War? And was his sister Eliza thankful he had moved west, believing he was safer out there, far from the carnage of Shiloh, Antietam, and Fredericksburg? Some questions are answered, others would take more research, and many can never be answered at all.
