[70] Jason Russell and eleven comrades in death were interred in one grave, without coffins, in the Precinct burying ground, and in the clothes in which they fell. Smith says they were laid ‘head to point.’ The tradition is that Capt. William Adams, who lived near by, brought a sheet from his house, to be wrapped round Russell's body at the interment, saying he could not bear to have his neighbor buried before his eyes without a winding sheet. The names of only three of the occupants of this grave, and these belonging to what is since West Cambridge and Arlington, are at present known. A plain obelisk of pure New Hampshire granite, about nineteen feet in height above the level ground, and encircled by a plain substantial stone and iron fence, which now stands above the grave, contains this inscription, inserted in the main shaft of the monument on a marble tablet:
‘Erected by the Inhabitants of West Cambridge, A. D. 1848, over the common grave of Jason Russell, Jason Winship, Jabez Wyman and nine others, who were slain in this town by the British Troops on their retreat from the Battles of Lexington and Concord, April 19th, 1775. Being among the first to lay down their lives in the struggle for American Independence.’1The Danvers men, by being thus surrounded at Menotomy, lost heavily of their number. Their slain, seven in all—see their names in a previous note—were buried in their own town. Two were wounded-Nathan Putnam and Dennison Wallis. One, Joseph Bell, was missing after the battle, being taken prisoner
