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Edward Saulpaugh

Born 1821 Died 1867

St. Paul’s Lutheran Church. One of the tallest, white, marble monuments in the cemetery. A tapered column topped with urn, heavily eroded, far behind the church, three or four rows west of the cedar trees, south of the central access road.

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There are three people’s names engraved on one of the tallest monuments in the cemetery.  The monument is notable for its height, its design, and for the tragic beauty that erosion has inscribed on it over the last 150 years. It is also mysterious at first glance because two of the sides are blank and those engraved on it are a bit unusual. One side remembers Edward Saulpaugh. The other remembers his wife Lucy Ann and the brother of his son’s wife, Lorin Sagendorf. 

The absence of any other names on the monument can be explained by the fact that Edward and Lucy’s only child, Eugene Saulpaugh removed to Los Angeles. It is likely that the monument was erected after Edward’s death and space was left for Eugene and his wife, so when Lorin passed in 1922 and Eugene was still living, his name was stuck in under Lucy’s, rather than put on a side that might have gone to Eugene’s family.

Edward Saulpaugh was a farmer. He may have had other business dealings or perhaps held mortgages for others as his wife’s name appears in legal notices in the newspapers regarding lawsuits after his death. Or perhaps he was uncommonly good at farming and thus was able to afford such a tall, impressive gravemarker. Edward enlisted for two years during the Civil War in June of 1863 and at the time his address was in Madalin (a hamlet of Tivoli). He died of Typhoid fever in 1867 at only 46 years of age.

Edward’s son Eugene Saulpaugh married Eva D. Sagendorf in 1876 and they had three children, Maud Saulpaugh (1878-bef. 1910), Truman Andrew Saulpaugh (1880-1931), and Ralph Eugene Saulpaugh (1883-1937). Some time after Ralph was born, Eugene and Eva separated and she dropped out of available records’ reach after 1913. It would appear Maud died young and Truman and Ralph ended up in Los Angeles where they died in the 1930s. Only Truman had children, two daughters, Olive and Leona. Lorin Sagendorf married Almeda Newberry and they did not have any children together. She survived him by more than two decades and is buried with her brother’s family in Malden, NY.

Time marches ever onwards, much like the erosion of Edward Saulpaugh’s marble monument. Though not the only one to suffer in this and every burying ground the world over, its slow destruction is an ironically ugly sort of beauty. Pollutants mixing with water vapor which steadily drench the porous stone with acid rain react with the calcium carbonate base of marble and limestone, converting it to calcium sulfate or calcium nitrate, which is then washed away. On this particular monument, one can see veins of the stone that contain more of this calcium carbonate have eroded faster, leaving the surface rougher in some places than others. Fissures and cracks are developing due to erosion which one day will cause water and ice to fracture the stone, but for now paint a melancholy sort of landscape around the inscriptions. When it was new, the Saulpaugh monument would have been polished and pristine, white and gleaming.