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It stands over the city like an idol, at the very top of Highland Cemetery. If you’ve been up there, you’ve seen it – the Hopkins monument, overlooking Lock Haven, a tall pillar with a stone carving of a woman at the top.
The monument was placed there by Albert Cole Hopkins, a congressman who made his money in the lumber business. He once lived in the Carskaddon building, the big Y-shaped building at the corner of Water and Vesper streets.
Recently, while doing the Highland Cemetery walking tours in October, I was talking with Dave Wallace who runs the cemetery association. We were speculating about who the woman at the top might be – is it Jennie Peale, the daughter of Albert and his first wife, Lydia? Or is it Lydia herself, who died first?
Hopkins married Lydia and they had Jennie, who later married Rembrandt Peale. Lydia died in 1861, at age 21. Jennie died in 1886, not much older. Albert married Julia Taylor, who died in 1896, and then Matilda, who outlived him and died in 1931. Albert Hopkins himself died in 1911. He had children to all three wives. They are all listed on the monument; it’s like a municipal phone book up there.
So, the woman on top Who is it? The most likely possibilities were Jennie, the daughter, or Lydia, the mom.
It doesn’t take too much to get me curious. A few words at the right moment will generally do it. So I started pulling information about the Hopkins family.
Lydia Hopkins, it turns out, is not actually buried there. It took me a while to figure this out – she has no obituary locally, so I had to widen my search. She is buried in Forestville, N.Y., where the family was living when she died in 1861.
Jennie Hopkins is also listed on the monument, and is in Highland. She died in 1886. Her obituary in the Clinton Democrat says, “All that human mind could conceive and hands could do was done for the patient sufferer, but the dark angel conquered in the hard fought battle, Jennie L. Peale having expired at 11 o’clock Tuesday morning in the 26th year of her age. She leaves, beside her parents, a husband and a little two weeks old son.”
The “besides her parents” part is an error, by the way. Her natural mother was Lydia, who had been dead a quarter century by this point. The obit refers to her father, Albert, and her stepmother, Julia.
So the question is, who was Albert grieving for when he built the monument?
If it was built pre-1886, that would most likely mean it’s a memorial to Lydia, and the rest of the names were added later. If it was built in 1886 or after, that would make it more likely to be Jennie on top, with Lydia’s name added as a memorial.
(While trying to figure this out, I actually strung all of this stuff up on the library’s bulletin board – all the obits and cemetery records, with the connections marked with string, like they do on all the police shows. I’ve always wanted to do that.)
It all came down to when the monument was built. So finally, after all my string and photocopies and pacing, I just called Dave Wallace and asked about it.
He got back to me in about 10 minutes, and told me that Albert Cole Hopkins had purchased the first lot on Sept. 28, 1886. Which makes it the right time to bury Jennie there. It’s a reasonable assumption that he wasn’t building a statue of a wife 25 years gone, but of a daughter who had very recently died.
The woman at the top of the monument is most likely Jennie Hopkins Peale.
Having found that out, I had to remove all my string and paper from the bulletin board and clean up my mess.
But I think that’s the answer. I think it’s Jennie. And while I was up in Highland for the tours, I started thinking It’s kind of cool to be memorialized that way. I’d kind of like to be buried there one day, and maybe have a statue of myself built up on top of a monument. Except I’d like them to make me better looking.
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Lou Bernard is a Lock Haven resident with a keen interest in the history of this area. He is adult services coordinator at Ross Library and may be reached at ross13@rosslibrary.org or 570-748-3321.