Portsmouth, New Hampshire City Councilor Eric Spear came across a gravestone in the North Cemetery, off Islington St., with a tragic epitaph about 3 children who died within a 4-day stretch in 1798. Spear visited the cemetery in March. AP photo by Rich Beauchesne/Portsmouth Herald
Portsmouth, New Hampshire City Councilor Eric Spear came across a gravestone in the North Cemetery, off Islington St., with a tragic epitaph about 3 children who died within a 4-day stretch in 1798. Spear visited the cemetery in March. AP photo by Rich Beauchesne/Portsmouth Herald Credit: Portsmouth Herald photographs — Rich Beauchesne

Portsmouth, n.h. — Jessica Ross believes she might have unraveled important clues to the mysterious deaths of three Portsmouth children within four days in 1798.

Ross, a special collections assistant at the city library, said documents in the library’s collection proved “1798 was a rough year for Portsmouth.”

Two epidemics hit the city the year the Walker children died, according to records compiled by Dr. Lyman Spalding, one of Portsmouth’s first doctors. Mortality rates effectively doubled that year.

“The most commonly known one is the spread of yellow fever that went through the city brought by a merchant ship owned by Thomas Sheafe,” she said. “Although two crew members were infected when the ship docked, it was not quarantined and many residents, including three of Sheafe’s own children, succumbed to the fever.”

But that epidemic didn’t occur until summer and the Walker children died in March, according to their tombstone. It’s more likely, Ross believes, that the Walker children died from a “severe outbreak of dysentery due to contaminated drinking water … that began sweeping the city earlier in the year and killed as many citizens, mostly children, as did the fever.”

City Councilor Eric Spear showed a Portsmouth Herald reporter and photographer a tombstone in the city’s North Cemetery that chronicled the tragic death of the three children. Portsmouth residents Seth and Temperance Walker described their three children, Nancy, Temperance and Samuel Walker, as “promising children … who were lovely and pleasant in life and in their deaths were not divided.”

The children died at the ages of 12, 6 and 4, according to the solemn tombstone located deep within the cemetery.

Ross also learned in April that according to the 1821 Portsmouth City Directory, Seth Walker was a shipmaster and the family lived in a home on High Street.

Spalding wrote a letter to Portsmouth’s New Hampshire Gazette in 1799, which Ross said “served as a call to arms and in 1799 the State Legislature elected three health officials to monitor wells and provide sanitation standards for the city.”

“By 1802, the mortality rate had dropped dramatically, from 2 percent of the population, more than 100 people, to only eight deaths due to infectious and preventable disease,” Ross said.

Like Spear, Ross believes the city’s historic cemeteries offer Portsmouth’s residents valuable history about the city. And like the city’s cemetery, Ross said, the library’s special collections department has “a ton of local history.”

“We have all the cemetery indexes,” Ross said. “You can look people up by name and we have full cemetery maps so you can find out exactly where the tombstones are.”

Spear has spent time visiting many of the city’s historic cemeteries and has been moved by the stories they tell, especially the Walker’s story. “We just don’t have that kind of thing happen these days,” he said.

If you visit the tombstone, you will see that Seth and Temperance Walker looked forward to the day they might see their children again. “In realms of bliss we wait your fond embrace, where we behold the savior face to face,” the inscription from 1798 reads.