Dozens of winged friends pay hourly visits to “birdland,” the screened-in porch of Sarah Kinter’s Canterbury home, flitting about the lavish gardens of daffodils, peonies, lilies and flowering shrubs that blanket the perimeter of the house.

From the moment they met, her capacity for turning strangers — both critter and human — into intimates struck Harry Kinter, who would become Sarah’s husband for nearly 50 years.

Sarah was the head librarian at the Martha Washington Library in Alexandria, Virginia, and had been previously divorced, swearing off men as a result. Before their blind date, a Chinese cooking class, she had interrogated Harry through the mutual acquaintance responsible for their set-up: Do you enjoy classical music? How about football?

If he had answered any differently at the time, Harry acknowledged, he wouldn’t be sitting in his upholstered armchair in their tidy living room on Kimball Pond Road, a room that has more recently become a gathering space where his late wife’s “funeral committee” drafted eulogies, offered comfort and memorialized her.

“She was a magnet. It was a whole new world for me — I was a bachelor, I went to work and I played golf and a little bit of pool,” Harry said. “She saved me.”

Sarah Kinter, 83, died at home on May 8. Her lifetime is etched in Harry’s memory.

He readily recounts the details of her Ohio upbringing and dutifully boasts of the numerous job offers she received out of college at Case Western Reserve University, despite learning of these histories secondhand. Most of all, he remembers her as she hoped to be remembered: as a descendant of notable abolitionist Nathaniel Peabody Rogers and an heir to his social conscience.

Rogers, born in Plymouth, was known among his contemporaries for a full-throated belief in moral suasion as a means to achieve emancipation, a conviction shared by fellow journalist and reformer William Lloyd Garrison that lasting social change could only be achieved if it began in people’s hearts and minds.

He died in 1846, requesting that his grave remain unmarked as long as slavery prevailed in America.

Nearly 100 years later, Rogers gained a headstone in Concord’s Old North Cemetery that honored him as a “Friend of the Slave.” His great-great-granddaughter, Sarah Kinter, will be buried beside him on Thursday in accordance with her wishes.

‘What would NPR do’

Rebecca Noel met Sarah and Harry Kinter a decade ago at the Peace Public Library in Plymouth. They had come to hear her speak about a man whose name she recognized but didn’t know much about until 2008, when a student at Plymouth State University, where Noel teaches American history, exhumed a forgotten plaque from the university’s archives.

“She said, ‘Who is this? What is this? Why is it in the archives and not hung up somewhere?’ ” she remembered. “It was Rogers.”

For Noel, an expert of the Antebellum period, the discovery sparked a parallel interest she’s shared in a series of talks since 2014. She poured over an autobiography by one of Rogers’s sons, Daniel Farrand Rogers, found in the same archives. She learned that Rogers had been a radical among radicals — abolition was not a popular idea in the 1830s, even between white people in the north.

In Concord, two abolitionists, John Greenleaf Whittier and George Thompson, were attacked with mud and stones in 1835. In Illinois in 1837, an abolitionist newspaper editor, Elijah Parish Lovejoy, was killed.

One year later, Rogers would begin editing the anti-slavery newspaper Herald of Freedom, believing in the ideal that “he could talk slavery out of existence,” according to Noel. “He believed that was all that was needed, because after their hearts and minds were properly changed, they would do what it took to eradicate slavery. It’s very extreme kind of purist position.”

This was a story that Sarah had heard from her grandmother years before Noel encountered it as a researcher. Even so, Noel estimates Sarah and Harry Kinter have attended her talks half a dozen times since 2014. They’ve met many times throughout the years to honor Rogers’s legacy, and this year, Noel and the Kinters worked together to nominate Rogers to the National Abolition Hall of Fame.

Harry said his late wife’s fascination with Rogers stemmed from a sense of identification.

In their home of more than four decades, he faithfully narrated her contributions to the racial integration of the library system in Fairfax County, Virginia, where she hired the library’s first Black employee and brought onto its shelves the first titles written by prominent Black authors. He sees other parallels between their lives: Rogers was a renowned nature writer; Sarah had a certifiably green thumb. Rogers was an advocate for animal rights; Sarah kept feline companions since childhood.

“It’s almost like she would ask herself, ‘What would NPR do?’” Harry said, referring to Rogers by his initials. “Some of it was genetic, part of it was that he was just her role model.”

During her research, Noel learned a curious fact about Rogers’s own lineage: His ancestor John Rogers, a religious reformer born in 1500, was the first Protestant martyr to be executed under Queen Mary I of England, or “Bloody Mary.” This history, although gruesome, gave Noel perspective.

“These are people who put their beliefs on the line,” she said. “It was a very politically zealous family tradition, and Sarah felt that as well.”

Historic burial

Across from Harry’s armchair, a pendulum clock ticks over the hearth, a backdrop recognizable from Sarah’s obituary photo. She selected it herself, he said, because the picture made her look “foxy.”

He remembered her as generous and independent, a woman who donated every penny of her 401k to charity and who didn’t like being told what to do. The only difference between herself and Rogers — that Harry can think of — is Rogers’s strong belief in the temperance movement. “She drew the line there. She liked a wine of a beer with dinner, she wouldn’t say ‘no’ because NPR wouldn’t approve.”

Sarah will be buried to the right of Rogers’ grave, with an inverted vault over her so that the ground does not cave in on itself as her casket decomposes — a process she requested to keep the interment “as natural as possible,” according to Jill Huckins, cemetery administrator for the city of Concord.

The burial itself is an anomaly at Old North.

The historic cemetery’s first and latest burials have been in the family plot of Rev. Timothy Walker. Walker’s four-year-old daughter was buried there in 1736, and his descendant, Charles Rumford Walker III, was cremated and buried in the same plot in the fall of 2016. A person who can trace their lineage to someone already buried at Old North may be interred there, but for the most part, the cemetery is closed.

“This is very non-typical. As far as casket burials, I couldn’t tell you the last time there was a casket burial,” Huckins said.

To Harry, the rarity of the burial encapsulates Sarah — and the man whose life she sought to emulate — as does the scarf and hat giveaway at her funeral service on Friday.

“Not famous, but important,” he said. Not typical, but “a guiding light” for their communities.

 

Rebeca Pereira can be reached at rpereira@cmonitor.com