Two men in Space, Two Centuries Apart at Annapolis

This gravestone for Astronaut Capt. James Arthur Lovell Jr, stands in the US Naval Academy Cemetery in Annapolis. Though he is still alive at 96, the stone was placed following the death of his wife, Marilyn. Photos by Dennis Forney

During two recent regional hikes, Becky and I came across the graves of two American heroes, distinctive but also distinctively different.

We stumbled across the first grave while wending our way through the US Naval Academy Cemetery in Annapolis. Cemeteries provide great windows into history.

James Arthur Lovell, Jr., a captain in the US Navy and 1952 academy graduate, flew into space four different times. Along with Frank Borman and William Anders, they were the first humans to orbit the moon in a 1968 mission. According to a Wikipedia article: “He then commanded the Apollo 13 lunar mission in 1970 which, after a critical failure en route, looped around the Moon and returned safely to Earth.” That flawed mission became the basis of Lovell’s 1994 book titled Lost Moon and the subsequent Apollo 13 film.

Those experiences gave him the perspective leading to the inscription on the reverse side of his gravestone.

Although the stone is in place, Lovell, born in 1928 and now 96, continues to orbit the sun above ground in his earthly existence.  The stone was placed following the death of his wife, Marilyn, whose remains are interred where Lovell will ultimately be buried.

We sought out the second distinctive gravestone, that of Joshua Thomas, in the cemetery of St. John’s Methodist Church on Deal Island in Somerset County’s Tangier Sound. Thomas was known as the Parson of the Islands because of his fervently dedicated preaching throughout the islands of the Chesapeake archipelago.

We motored down through that chain of islands last week aboard Nellie Peach. Dividing Tangier Sound from the main stem of the Bay, the archipelago includes, among others, Hoopers, Bloodsworth, Deal, Smith, Tangier, and, southernmost, Watts, islands.

This historical marker for Joshua Thomas stands across the highway from where he is buried at St. Johns’s Methodist Church on Deal Island.

A deeply visceral spirituality–evidenced by excited shouting and leaping during camp meeting services he organized and directed–charged Thomas’s soul. It was an electricity he knew with complete certainty emanated from the God he believed inhabits the heavenly space surrounding us in the infinite universe.

An accomplished sailor and waterman, Thomas made his island orbits in a custom-built, two-masted log canoe named The Methodist.

He sallied out from his home on Tangier Island to the other inhabited islands for camp meetings during the time  Tangier was occupied by an estimated 12,000 British troops during the War of 1812.

This illustration showing Joshua Thomas preaching to British troops on Tangier Island in 1814 is from Adam Wallace’s 1872 biography of the parson published by the Methodist Home Journal in Philadelphia.

An official historical marker stands along the highway near his burying place.  It celebrates his bold and fulfilled prediction during a prayer service the British asked him to lead just before they sailed northward for their ill-fated attack on Baltimore.

The soldiers had succeeded a few weeks previously in navigating the Potomac and burning the young nation’s capital. However–as our national anthem attests–their cockiness evaporated before the guns of Fort McHenry and the determination of Baltimore’s citizens in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

When the diminished and defeated forces made their way back to Tangier, it’s reported they told Thomas they should have listened to his warnings which he said had come to him from heavenward through the voice of God.

The cover of the Thomas biography features this drawing of the log canoe the preacher sailed to various Chesapeake Islands through his years of service.

Dennis Forney has been a publisher, journalist and columnist on the Delmarva Peninsula since 1972.  He writes from his home on Grace Creek in Bozman.