Feb. 7, 2003 – The St. John Historical Society is hard on the heels of a mystery. After funding the $1,000 restoration a 19th-century grave, the oldest in the Cruz Bay Cemetery, the members wanted to know more about the person buried there.
Through diligent research and happenstance, they have managed to learn quite a lot.
Her name was Lucretia Minor. She was born on St. Croix on Nov. 20, 1820, and died on St. John on May 22, 1895.
"We kind of think she came here to take care of a relative," Chuck Pishko, St. John Historical Society president, said.
This is what Pishko and other society members, including historian David Knight, have found out: She was baptized in 1820 at the Moravian Church in Christiansted. She appears on the 1841 and 1846 Christiansted census rolls as Lucretia Howard, an unmarried seamstress living with her family at 25 Queen Cross Street. Sometime before 1850, she moved to 6 King Cross Street and took the surname Minor, although she still was listed as unmarried. By 1855, it appears that she moved away from Christiansted.
"It's like getting a set of clues. It's an unraveling tale of a person who was basically lost," Pishko said.
The clues continued in a St. John deed book entry dated June 17, 1886. The entry records the sale of a two-room house and a half lot of land in Cruz Bay. Pishko said the land lay adjacent to Nazareth Lutheran Church and the building in 1915 became part of what is now church property.
According to the deed, Margreth Ernesta Croneberg sold the house to Alexandra Minor of Christiansted for $55. Croneberg had inherited the house from her aunt, Sophia Weinmar of St. John.
The connection? Alexandra Minor's mother, Lucretia Minor, got to stay in the house for the rest of her life. And she also had the right to sell it, provided the money went to her daughter.
Pishko said Knight stumbled onto the deed by accident. He was killing time one day waiting for someone to finish work at the Recorder of Deeds Office on St. Thomas when, on a whim, he pulled out the "T" book, which contains Cruz Bay records dating to the 19th century. As he randomly opened the book, the name Lucretia Minor jumped off the page.
In the cemetery, her grave lay adjacent to the road and was in very bad shape, Pishko said, with the stone and bricks coming apart. However, he said, the marble top indicates that the person buried there was someone of means.
Pishko, who has vowed to continue tracking down Lucretia Minor's history, asks that anyone with further information about her call him at 693-7406.
Among its other activities, the Historical Society recently built wooden mounts for the guns at the Battery in Cruz Bay. Pishko said the original plans, discovered in the archives in Denmark, were followed. Society members Don Bowry, Bob Pullen, and his son, Tom, recreated the original mounts to replace the existing, but historically incorrect, concrete boxes.
Pishko said society members are currently involved in clearing a trail to the L'Esperance estate ruins.
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