children of Rebecca Nourse, and a beautiful monument now marks the
spot to which her body was removed. There is a similar tradition in
the Procter family, and there is good reason to believe that his body
was removed in a similar manner. But if so, the necessary secrecy with
which the sad duty was performed has caused the place where he was
buried to be known only by the slender thread of tradition which I
have mentioned.

The boulder inscribed to the memory of John Procter, which was
dedicated this past year at the junction of Lowell and Summit Streets
in Peabody, must be considered to have been placed there not as
indicating the locality of his burial, but because that was the most
suitable and available ground in the near neighborhood of the house
where for so many years and at the time of his death he lived as the
tenant of the great Downing Farm. There was the entrance to the Farm
from Salem, and from that spot one obtains a full view of the farm
house where he lived, believed to be in part still standing on the
same site, and of the fine and far extending tillage land which
probably first attracted the admiration of Emanuel Downing two hundred
and seventy years ago, and is now found so attractive and admirably
suited to the purposes of a golf ground by the Salem Country Club.

What is now known as the Procter Tomb on the north side of Lowell
Street at the southeastern corner of the Downing Farm is of modern
origin. We cannot believe that John Procter's family would have
deposited his body in ground to which they then had no title except as
tenants. At the time of the imprisonment of John Procter and his wife
Elizabeth the family was no doubt broken up and the house stripped of
everything that could be taken away to pay the fees of arrest and
imprisonment. The great farm was no longer their home and they were
not again in a position to return to and occupy it as their own until
nearly a decade had passed, when, through the efforts of Thorndike,
one of the sons of John Procter, the Downing Farm in its entirety was
purchased from Charles, the grandson of Emanuel Downing and son of Sir
George Downing, then deceased.

At the time of his death in 1692 John Procter owned, except what land
in Ipswich he may have inherited from his father, only the fifteen
acres with a house upon it, which, as I have said, was just west of
the Downing Farm on the north side of Lowell Street. This fact alone
would render it entirely pro