Solomon Hopkins

Headstone GPS Coordinates: Burial Location Unknown

Birth: 1816, Damariscotta, Lincoln County, Maine

Death: 24 May 1864, Port Townsend, Jefferson County, Washington

Relatives in Seabeck Cemetery: None known

American Revolutionary War Patriots*: David Hopkins, Massachusetts – Maine District

Disclaimer: These lines have not been officially proven by NSDAR standards.

Solomon Hopkins is one of the earliest known burials in the cemetery.

In 1816, he was born in Damariscotta, Lincoln County, Maine, to his parents Robert Hopkins and Priscilla Chapman. When Solomon was four years old in 1820, his father Robert died. His mother remarried the next year to a man named William Cargill, and the family lived in Jefferson, Lincoln County, Maine.

When Solomon was twenty-seven years old, he married Susan T. Chase in Bangor, Penobscot County, Maine on January 21, 1843. They had a daughter named Lillian born in 1844 and a son named Frederick born in 1847. By 1850, the family was settled in Milford where Solomon worked as a lumberman. On the 1860 census, Solomon was listed as a master millman.

By 1862, Solomon had travelled out to Seabeck, to work in the mill. His wife and two teenage children stayed behind in Maine. In The Washington Standard newspaper dated November 22, 1862, he was listed  as one of the contributors towards the “Relief of Disabled Soldiers in the Federal Army” along with several other men in Seabeck. He donated $10.

Solomon was forty-eight years old when an accident with a circular saw happened presumably while he was working in the mill. He sustained an injury that took his life the next day on May 24, 1864. His injury and death were reported in The Washington Standard:

Died: In Port Townsend, on the 24th ult, from a wound inflicted on the left arm on the 23d ult. by a circular saw, at Seabeck, SOLOMON HOPKINS, aged 48 years, of Milford, Maine where he leaves a large family to mourn his loss.”

Solomon’s body was brought back to Seabeck and buried. He was likely one of the fifteen burials exhumed from the first burial ground near the bay, and re-interred in the current cemetery. It’s unknown where in Seabeck Cemetery Solomon is now buried.