Lot 49
Highland Lot 112
Joseph Day (1807-1876)
Hannah Ellis Rhoades Day (1808-1863)
Joseph Lewis Day (1831-1833)
H. Faustina Day (1833-1856)
Martha R. Day Leonard (1840-1870)
Joseph Day was born on July 25, 1807 in Walpole, Massachusetts. He was the son of Ebenezer Day and Adah Boyden Day.
Joseph Day was a currier of leather. Currying leather was hard manual labor that required great skill. A currier would often work on a variety of hides including ox, cow, calf, goat, sheep, pig, and deer. After the tanning process, the currier would dress, finish, and color the tanned hide to make it strong, supple, and waterproof. After currying, the leather would be passed on to tradesmen who made saddles, bridles, shoes, and gloves. Day was employed in South Dedham with Smith tannery when he was 20. Restless and unsettled, he moved to Rhode Island and worked as a journeyman in the trade in Providence and Pawtucket for several years.
When he returned to South Dedham, Joseph Day married Hannah E. Rhoades (sometimes spelled Rhoads) on November 28, 1830. She was the daughter of Lewis and Hannah Ellis Rhoads. Joseph and Hannah had five children: Joseph Lewis, Faustina, Lewis, Mary E. B., and Martha R. Day, all born between 1831 and 1840.
Joseph Lewis Day, the couple’s first child, was born in September of 1831; he died on April 2, 1833 at 18 months.
For a time, Day tried his hand at manufacturing wrapping paper with Isaac Ellis but by 1833, he had returned to currying leather. He opened a shop and, after a decade of currying and selling leather, became so successful that he opened a business in Boston as a leather dealer. He was eventually joined in this business by his son, Lewis Day, born in 1835.
During the 1830s, Joseph and Hannah Day were among the group of young people who broke from the South Parish of the Church of Christ, Dedham, and formed the First Universalist Society of South Dedham.
In 1843 and 1844, Joseph Day was a representative to the Massachusetts General Court, and was a state senator from Norfolk County in 1856 and 1857. During his senate term he was an active member of the Committee on Prisons and Reformatory Institutions. He was also a Mason and was instrumental in the formation of South Dedham’s own Lodge in 1861. A lodge history written on its hundredth anniversary called him “perhaps the outstanding man in the formation of the Lodge.” Day held the position of treasurer of the group from its inception until his death.
H. Faustina Day, the second child of Joseph and Hannah Day, who had been born in July of 1833, died at 23 years of age on December 22, 1856.
Hannah Ellis Rhoades Day died on June 2, 1863 of lung fever. She was memorialized by an obituary which read in part, “She was a woman in whom less common energy and decision were blended with a sound judgment, and a mind of great simplicity, uprightness, and purity. She was quiet and unobtrusive with a remarkable freedom from all affectation…. Her character was eminently religious. Her virtues were exalted and clarified by a pure and heartfelt Christian faith, which even in trials most sharp and sudden, gave her a steady fortitude that not only sustained herself but imported strength to others.”
In 1864, Joseph Day retired and turned his business over to his son Lewis, who, by that time, had married Anna Smith, the daughter of Lyman Smith of the Smith tannery and had one son, Fred Holland Day. On July 25, 1866, Joseph Day married a second time. His wife, Jane E. Bigelow Brown was a widow whose husband, James Brown, had died in 1852.
In retirement, Joseph Day busied himself with his properties (which included part ownership in the St. James Hotel in Jacksonville, Florida where he vacationed) and as a member of building committees for Dean Academy in Franklin, Massachusetts, and the Universalist Church in South Dedham.
Hannah and Joseph Day’s youngest child, Martha R. Day, born in 1840, was married in 1864 to Mahlon R. Leonard, a leather dealer. She died on September 2, 1870; her death was attributed to “poison from paint.”
On September 26, 1876, Joseph Day died. His death was attributed to apoplexy and his occupation was noted as “gentleman.” Day was eulogized in the Universalist, the official newspaper of the Universality Society. He was called “a well-developed, good and true man” who, through “hard work, sound judgment, and temperate habits” had been “the architect of his own fortune,” overcoming a lack of formal education to achieve business and personal success. (In 1870, his personal and real estate worth was well over a million dollars by today’s valuation.) More important, Day had devoted his life to aid others, “always ready to vote the largest sums for schools, highways, and [the] poor” and consistently encouraging the advancement of all people. He was, the write concluded, “as open-hearted as he was open-handed.”
Hannah Ellis Rhoades Day and Joseph Day and their children Joseph Lewis Day, H. Faustina Day, and Martha R. Day Leonard, were interred in lot 49 of Old Parish Cemetery. Shortly after Highland Cemetery was founded, in 1888, their remains and gravestone were removed to lot 112 of that cemetery.
Around 1895, at the beginning of his career as a pioneer pictorial photographer, Joseph and Hannah Day’s grandson, Fred Holland Day, created a tribute to his grandmother with his now famous photograph, “Hannah.” Costumed in mid-nineteenth century garb and seated in a Windsor chair, Day’s model embodied an idealized New England woman: capable and stoic. A contemporary critic called the image “surely one of the masterpieces of photography.”
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