The Whitefield Cenotaph: A Rediscovered Work by William Strickland

Abstract

THE CENOTAPH to the memory of George Whitefield, eighteenth-century British evangelist, located in the First Presbyterian Church of Newburyport, Massachusetts, is an early work by William Strickland which has heretofore been overlooked by modem scholarship. Designed in the fall of 1828 or the winter of 1829, the cenotaph is therefore earlier than either the Benjamin Carr monument (1831)1 or the William Lehman monument (probably 1829).2 Furthermore, because the Whitefield cenotaph is in mint condition, having been indoors and well cared for during the past 145 years, it provides a unique example of both Strickland's original design, and the stone carving of his master mason John Struthers. The monument is signed by both men, making authorship certain. It is ironic that the cenotaph has escaped notice for so long since during the seventy-five years after it was erected it was depicted with some frequency-in a published lithograph, in a biography of Whitefield, in Harper's Monthly, and in numerous stereographs and photographs.3 In all cases, however, it was illustrated as the monument to the evangelist Whitefield, not as a work by Strickland. But the fact that is had been designed by Strickland and carved by Struthers had been mentioned when it was erected in 1829,4 and the names were repeated in a late nineteenth-century biography of Whitefield,5 and in the encyclopedic History of Newburyport of 19o6 by John Currier,6 to mention only two instances. But thereafter the name of the architect seems to have been lost; recent informational literature of the church does not include it.'