06/20/2026
Consoling light on an 1825 tragedy
Our humanity, I’m constantly reminded, suffuses our old papers. Recently, Manuscripts Cataloger for the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina, Brian Cuthrell, sent reports in his collection illuminating a mystery that’s haunted me: St. Stephen’s 1825 burial of three Penn medical students (See my FB post, May 2, 2019). The papers of their classmate from SC, Dr. John Winsmith (then John Winn Smith), document the class campaign to provide a grave marker for the three, just after they died, at St. Stephen’s through a grieving professor. These reports conveyed moving “affection”—through a faculty and collegial gesture to three fallen students from afar--and confirmed what I wondered, that their enabler was St. Stephen’s cofounder and vestryman, Virginia-born Dr. Nathaniel Chapman (see portrait). Dr. Chapman arranged for the marker, by St. Stephen’s stonemason John Struthers, and free individual tombs for each (vs the charity common vault) at the churchyard’s entrance--an extraordinary gift of valuable ground that affirmed human dignity and neighbor relations: Penn was then a block away.
Oh to know all. Yet we now see the humanity that confronted the tragedy, thanks to two distant archives and their researchers. Thanks to Brian who revealed this corpus with proven potential for many. The collection’s website: sc.edu/libraries/scl.
Suzanne Glover Lindsay, St. Stephen’s historian
