Subterranean Celebrities: Hudson and Sally Bayley
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.
Hudson and Sarah Bayley slate head stone in Eastern Cemetery.
For every stone in the cemetery, there are umpteen stories about the people associated with it! Some stones list more than one person as in the case of the Bayley marker in Section B.
It is a slate headstone, one of many carved with an urn and willow in the timpanum. The inscription is bordered with a decorative rickrack style. There are fans in the corner shoulders. You might notice a carver's mistake in Hudson's last name. The first Y in Bayley was changed from a G. This is still a likely mispelling of Bailey repeated in Sarah's inscription.
In memory of
HUDSON BAYLEY.
drowned at sea
Aug. 19, 1798,
AEt. 48.
Also,
SALLY
wife of the late
Hudson Bayley,
died Nov. 17, 1838.
AEt. 87.
Born the son of Captain Joseph and Mercey Cox Bailey, Hudson was given the name of his father's mother's last name. He married Sarah “Sally” Yeaton in November 1775 in Portland. They had several children, and he served as a lieutenant in the 11th Regiment of the Massachusetts Continental Line during the Revolutionary War. The Cumberland County, Maine archives state: “He sailed from Portland as mate in the vessel named Snow Maria with father, as captain. The vessel was captured, and condemned as a valuable prize. The captain died about that time, and Hudson, the son, was washed overboard and drowned....” Sally lived in a 2-story house near where the Cumberland County Civic Center now stands. She lived above an apothecary shop there, and died in that home about 40 years later.
This information was first published in the December 2012 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: September 2026
Further Reading
Hudson Bayley is also noted in our list of Veterans.