Last Known Burial in Old Parish Cemetery
With the opening of Highland Cemetery, families began to purchase lots there. As the 20th century progressed, fewer and fewer burials took place at Old Parish Cemetery.
On March 24, 1960, Eva Mabel Ellis Richard was interred in Old Parish Cemetery. It appears she was the last person to be buried there.
Born on September 19, 1877, in Norwood, Eva Mabel Ellis was the daughter of William Ellis (1830-1908) and Anna Mariann Hurd Ellis (1847-1928) who were married on August 7, 1869 in Norwood. William was an iron moulder working at Plimpton’s Foundry.
Eva grew up in Norwood and lived her early adult years with her parents while working as a book compositor. After her father’s death, Eva continued to live with her mother at the family home at 232 Nahatan Street (left photo below) and later in an apartment at the new Talbot Building at the corner of Washington and Guild Streets (right photo below). Erected in 1912, the Talbot Building was the first “modern” apartment building to be constructed in Norwood.
On November 12, 1919, Eva Mabel Ellis married Eugene Louis Richard in Boston. Richard worked on the railroad, lived in Providence, Rhode Island, and had been married previously. In the 1920 U. S. Census the couple was residing with Eugene’s parents in Providence. It is unclear when Eva and Eugene divorced but, by 1930, Eugene Richard was living in Providence with his wife, Alice, and two children. By 1940, he was an inmate at the Cranston (R.I.) State Hospital for Mental Diseases; Eugene Richard died there on February 7, 1941.
Meanwhile, Eva Richard, divorced, appears in the 1940 U.S. Census as an unemployed lodger in a rooming house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She died on March 5, 1960, in Dorchester, at the age of 82 years, 5 months, and 15 days. Eva Mabel Ellis Richard is buried in Old Parish Cemetery, lot 7, along with her parents and brother, Willie. Only Willie has a stone to mark the site.
