The Herring Creek church, christened St. James, and built in
1760 as a successor of an earlier church, possesses records
dating back to 1695.
It is here that the oldest gravestone in Maryland is to be
found. The inscription reads thus:
This Register is for her bones Her fame is more perpetual
than ye stones and Stil her Vertues through her life be gone
Shall live when earthly monuments are none.
Who reading this can rhuse but drop a teare For such a wife
& such a Mother deare. She ran her race & now is laid to
rest & Allalugia singes among the blest. 1665
Nearby lies a memorial to Christopher Birkhead, who died in
1676. For more than 200 years these stones lay at " Birkhead's
Meadows." This was doubtless a portion of the tract
of 1,300 acres confirmed to Christopher Birkhead in 1666, and
possibly lay near the house of Abraham Birkhead, the scene of
one of the many triumphs of George Fox, the Quaker, by
whom the "Speaker of the Assembly was convinced."
In 1888 the Birkhead tombstones were moved to St. James parish
churchyard and their scanty history shows a custom in
Maryland—namely, that of burying the dead in private
grounds—which has been the cause why so few graves from remote
times have been preserved. Where nearly every freeman, whether a
gentleman adventurer or otherwise, was a " planter," and his
home, cut off from those of his kind often by miles of
territory, became the nucleus of a small community like the
castle of some feudal lord, what more natural than that he
should provide a place of burial for members of his family and
his dependents, which sacred spot, by the lapse of time and
change of ownership, was first neglected, then forgotten and
finally lost.
There are only a few ancient tombs in this churchyard.
Among them is one to the memory of Rev. Henry Hall, an
early rector who died in 1723,
and another to the Hon. Seth Biggs, a dignitary who departed
this life July 31, 1708, in his fifty-fifth year
