The Founder Who Picked His Own Grave: “Captain” Jacob Spear of Braintree, Vermont

Every spring, my mother, my grandmother, my great-aunt, and I made the same trip to a small, unmarked cemetery tucked behind an old family home in Braintree, Vermont. There’s no gate and no sign, just a scattering of stones under the trees, and one very large rock at an elevated spot set apart from all the rest. That boulder is the only marker for my second cousin four times removed, “Captain” Jacob Spear — one of the men who founded this town, and by every account, one of its most colorful characters.

Jacob Spear was born in 1755 in Braintree, Massachusetts, and by the time he reached Vermont he had already survived a war. He was one of sixty-five original petitioners who asked the Vermont legislature for a township charter in 1779, most of them fellow residents of Braintree, Massachusetts. The grant was approved in 1780, and the charter was signed by Governor Chittenden in 1781. When the proprietors held their first formal meeting in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1783, they chose Jacob and Jonathan Holman to draw up the plan for the new town — its lots, its roads, its shape on paper. Jacob then led the committee that rode out to the site to mark the boundaries on the ground. It’s said the new township took its name from his hometown, in his honor. He went on to serve as one of Braintree’s first three selectmen in 1788, and later as the town’s treasurer.

He had earned that kind of standing the hard way. Jacob enlisted as a private in January 1776, was wounded at the Battle of Trenton, and spent roughly six months as a British prisoner before escaping in January 1778. He reenlisted the following year and served the rest of the war as a corporal of marines aboard Navy ships and privateers. The Daughters of the American Revolution recognize him today as a Patriot Ancestor. The “Captain” in front of his name wasn’t an actual wartime rank — the honorific followed him into civilian life, most likely in recognition of the outsized part he played in building the town.

Jacob was also, by every account, a shrewd and occasionally reckless businessman. He speculated heavily in land and built up a large property — enough that Braintree’s own 1883 town history calls him “generally regarded as strictly honest,” while noting, in the next breath, that the greed of money-making eventually led him into an attempt to counterfeit coin. He is said to have run a private mint out of a small brick building just north of his house, with a partner history never named. When word finally got out, Jacob disappeared for several days before he was arrested and jailed. It is assumed he had locked himself inside of the brick mint to evade capture. He bailed himself out by deeding away six or eight lots of his own land to the officer handling the case — deeds still on record today, all dated around 1806–07. Not long after, he sold what remained of his Vermont property and moved his family to Moriah, New York.

He came back to Braintree only once more, on horseback, in the summer of 1829, at seventy-three years old. Riding up to his daughter Rhoda’s door, he answered her greeting with, “Rhoda, I have come for the last time.” He visited his nephews, then walked into the family cemetery and picked out his own grave site himself — the highest point in the ground, set apart from the other burials. His instructions were exact: none of the earth dug from the grave should go back into it; it should be filled with gravel carried up from the branch instead; and at the head should be placed a boulder as large as two yoke of oxen could haul. He died within days, and his family carried out every instruction to the letter. To this day, a large rock mostly buried near the high part of the small parcel is the only thing marking where Captain Jacob Spear is buried.

The image on this shirt isn’t Jacob’s world exactly — there’s no portrait or monument to picture him by. The rock we must assume marks the grave is nothing to look at. and resembles a small rocky outcropping. The image featured on our shirt is one of the town’s oldest surviving buildings. It’s the East Braintree Church, a piece of Braintree’s history that arrived a generation after Jacob’s Vermont years. The church was built in 1817 in Peth, a mill settlement about seven or eight miles away that emptied out once the railroad came through nearby Randolph and took the mill jobs with it. In 1844, the church was dismantled, drawn by horses to East Braintree, and reassembled there in 1845, where it still stands — and still holds services, ten weeks every summer. I grabbed the view of it from across the huge field dotted with yellow dandelions of spring.

This photo of the East Braintree Church is available now as a Signature Design shirt at MyHometownVermont.com — one way to carry home a small piece of the town Jacob Spear helped will into existence.

Braintree Signature Design Shirt: https://shop.myhometownvermont.com/products/braintree-vermont-photo-shirt-signature-design

Browse the rest of Braintree’s collection at our town page. For anyone with roots here it’s a fitting way to keep a little of Braintree close, wherever you’ve ended up: https://myhometownvermont.com/towns/braintree/