Philadelphia Weekly

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My friend and neighbor Bill Bolger had an unusual horticultural request for me this week. He asked if I might help him establish a bed of perennial flowers over the grave of a 19th-century woman he has extensively researched and written about: Agnes Smith, physician and wife of the fabled eccentric inventor Hezekiah Smith.

In the mid-1800s Hezekiah Smith bought Smithville, the large brick and iron compound that still stands today outside Mount Holly, N.J. There he manufactured woodworking machines and high-wheel bicycles.

True to the Victorian industrialist mold, Hezekiah was something of a maverick. He once had a bull moose trained to pull his carriage. Later in life, after Agnes' death, he arranged to have a half-dozen young women live with him to keep him company in his garden. He hired a full-time violinist. He was elected to the U.S. Congress, where he served a rather stormy term.

His company was the first to use an elevated bicycle railroad so his workers had a reliable and swift means of commuting.

Hezekiah Smith was also a bigamist. As a young man he cut all ties to Eveline, his first wife in Vermont, who refused him a divorce. This didn't deter Hezekiah. He promptly left in the local bank a sum of money in his wife's maiden name, burned all letters and family records pertaining to their union, and left Vermont, never to return.

Hezekiah met Agnes when she was a young woman working in the mills in Lowell, Mass. Smith hired her as his secretary, and later put her through school. She eventually earned a physician's degree from the University of Pennsylvania. The remaining photograph of her shows a beautiful woman: Agnes had a sweet, mild face, and was said to have had dark red hair and green eyes.

Together Hezekiah and Agnes ran Smithville; he minding the estate and workshop, and she editing the town newspaper and tending to her lucrative patent medicine business. Sadly, she died at the young age of 41, leaving no children.

My friend Bill feels the public scandal over Hezekiah's bigamy that surfaced in the year leading up to her death probably contributed to her tragic demise.

Hezekiah died in 1887, six years after Agnes. Upon his death, Elton--the eldest son of Hezekiah's first wife--had Agnes' posthumous marble statue smashed into dust and scattered into nearby Rancocas Creek. Elton then attempted to have his father's body exhumed and reinterred next to his deceased mother Eveline at Woodstock, Vt. But upon excavation, it was discovered Hezekiah was buried in an iron sarcophagus within an iron cage that was set into concrete. So he remains next to Agnes to this day.

Both graves can be found in St. Andrew's Cemetery in Mount Holly. Their modest plot rests on a woody hilltop, with bright shade and sandy soil. Agnes' grave includes a low carved marble wall in which a flower bed might have once thrived, but has been neglected for some time and is now home to little more than bare dirt and crabgrass.

So what to plant for Agnes? The nearby grave of a long-dead military officer sports a bed of tough prickly pear cactus, so it seems the age-old symbolic language of plants--floriography--is still practiced by a few holdouts.

Being a Victorian, floriography is something Agnes would've appreciated. Thus, planting showier flowers that symbolize ardent passion and romance, like roses, would be inappropriate if not downright creepy. We decided to plant a bed of hardy, fragrant rosemary, as it sports modest lavender blooms in spring and would blanket her grave in winter. It also has the added charm of being an ancient symbol of remembrance.

Sleep well, Agnes.