INDUSTRIES AND FIRESIDES. 2\\ 



these days is so summarily stopped by antitoxine, but 

 which had made cruel havoc with families of children for 

 many generations. That fall it began, November 8, by 

 sweeping into the grave a sixteen-year-old girl, Elizabeth 

 King. The next month four more children from five to 

 eleven years of age were buried. 



The year turned into January when three more fol- 

 lowed. Tn February and March four more. Before the 

 next November nineteen Cohasset children had been 

 smitten by this terrible foe. Then came a rest for a few 

 months ; but the next March five more perished, four of 

 them from one family in Beechwood, whose parents, left 

 childless and heartbroken, added their grief to the sadness 

 of the whole community. 



The good pastor Nehemiah Hobart records the sad list 

 as deaths by "fever and sore throat," and one feels a pity 

 for their necessary ignorance, both of the disease and its 

 cure. 



Two of his own little boys were among the unfortu- 

 nates, one of them John Jacob Hobart, named from the 

 first deacon, who was childless. 



The reference to these sad ravages of diphtheria calls 

 to mind a custom of old-fashioned burials. Cohasset set- 

 tlers who had burying land in Hingham took thither their 

 dead for many years after the first homes were set up 

 here. The earliest recorded burial in our town is that of 

 Sarah Pratt, first wife of Aaron Pratt, who died July 22, 

 1706, aged forty-two years. She was buried in the public 

 land which lay in front of Daniel Lincoln's lot next to 

 Little Harbor. This burial place has since become named 

 Central Cemetery, but no mention of it can be found in 

 any of the precinct records. 



A family burial ground was established by Israel 

 Nichols back of his dwelling on Jerusalem Road next to 

 Straits Pond. The road as it now runs, north of where 

 the house stood, touches a clump of bushes which conceal 



