I finally paid a visit to the Ancient Riverside Cemetery in Rhode Island to visit the grave of Hannah Nelson, who was Lizzie Borden’s most beloved housekeeper. The story of her life is poignantly written in Parallel Lives: A Social History of Lizzie A. Borden and Her Fall River, by Michael Martins and Dennis Binette.
Her story is a sad one. She died just short of her 38th birthday in 1908. She had gone to Rhode Island to her brother’s house to help him minister to his two children, both of whom had come down with dysentery. Both children died within a month of one another and Hannah took ill and died as well from the same malady. Lizzie was distraught at her death, and wrote a touching letter to a friend, Amanda Persson, another Swedish domestic in Fall River, “I cannot see why God could not have spared her to us. We wanted her so and her life was just thrown away.”
The cemetery is difficult to find and I was quite surprised to see that some changes had taken place since it was written about in Parallel Lives. The cemetery has erected a fence around the grave and a maker that says “Borden Plot” has been installed. Odd that, considering there is no documentation that Lizzie paid for this stone, although it is believed to be the case by the Fall River Historical Society since the brother could not have been able to afford this expensive granite headstone.
