Prince King & Miranda McHurd
In this cemetery lies Prince King, the first black landowner in Middlebury. King first appears in local records in the 1830s, working for a prominent sheep farmer. Later with the help of that farmer, a neighbor, and an abolitionist lawyer, King was able to purchase a 70-acre farm on East Munger Street. King lived there with Miranda McHurd, a white woman whom he was in a common-law marriage with until she died of tuberculosis in 1877. When King died in 1884, his estate was left to Miranda’s sister Emily.
Find out more about Prince & Miranda’s remarkable story here.
Mary Winchester
Mary Winchester was a remarkable women who overcame a tremendous amount of adversity in her life. The “recollections” or memoirs she wrote give us a lot of insight into her life. She struggled to obtain an education, the focus of Deborah P. Clifford’s article linked here.
She married a Middlebury College graduate, Warren Winchester in 1848 who eventually became a US Army Chaplain during the Civil War. With their four young children, she followed him to his station at a hospital in Washington DC. Sadly, one by one all her children contracted diphtheria, with only her son Willie surviving the disease. Her writing from this era still demonstrates an incredible perseverance and empathy for the suffering of others despite the tragedy that had struck her family. After the war ended, her family would return to Vermont and attempt to rebuild - however, out of the 12 children she would bear only her son Ben would survive to adulthood. She spent her old age with him in Concord, MA and upon her death she was buried in the Munger St Cemetery in order to be back under the Green Mountains she loved. Her story is one of tragedy, but also the human ability to endure.
Learn more about Mary’s incredible life here.