The Eastern Cemetery in Portland, Maine holds the memories of around 7,000 persons. Some of them are known; some are not. As we uncover stories of their lives, we share them through our e-newsletter. Sometimes the tidbits are not of life, but only of the artifact that remains. These are our subterranean celebrities.
Subterranean Celebrity: Joseph Coffin Boyd
Joseph Coffin Boyd's military marker with the stars and stripes
Joseph Coffin Boyd was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1760, but spent most of his life in Maine. He married Isabella Southgate in 1796, and the couple had 15 children. They first lived on Portland's Pleasant Street and then moved to Spring Street. In 1799, he led the Portland Federal Volunteers militia unit. He spent 2 years as a businessman in France, but returned home to Portland where he became clerk of the court of common pleas, notary public, and a deputy at the Portland Customs House. During the War of 1812, Boyd became the U.S. Army's district paymaster for Maine in early 1813, serving until 1815. At least once, he paid the troops out of his own pocket, which in today's dollars it would have been $68,000! Boyd would go on to serve as the state's first treasurer upon Maine's admission to the union in 1820. He still held that office when on May 13, 1823, Portland's Eastern Argus reported with "melancholy" that Boyd had died the day before "after a short attack of typhoid fever."
Historian Herb Adams worked to obtain Boyd's military marker from the government. Find out more in this Portland Press Herald column about the dedication ceremony (Note that the site requires a subscription to read it).
Joseph Coffin Boyd's Find A Grave entry includes his portrait. His stone's inscription reads:
JOSEPH
COFFIN
BOYD
DIST PAYMR
US ARMY
WAR OF 1812
1760
MAY 12, 1823
FIRST MAINE
STATE
TREASURER
This information was first published in the June 2024 issue of Spirits Alive eNews. It will be updated here as more information is available, but my contain information that is not quite right or needs to be corrected. Text may have been edited to make sense for this page as opposed to the eNews issue it had been a part of.
Last update: November 2026