Who Lies Here?
We sometimes share stories of families whose relatives are buried at Prospect Hill. The story below was included in our Spring 2013 issue of The View.
More than Forty Bosleys
More than 40 members of Towson’s Bosley family rest at Prospect Hill, including several infants. At age 100, Margaret Bosley Zimmerman is the sole surviving child of Aquilla and Eliza Bosley, who lived with their 11 offspring in a large, lovely home at 34 West Joppa Rd., on land that is now behind the old Gino’s building. The Bosley siblings were Edwin, Catherine, Charles, John, Margaret, Marie, Eleanor and twin sister Lavinia, Clint, William Henry, Gertrude and John Edward Hurst.
Margaret, who now lives with her son, Robert Zimmerman, remembers that, despite the large family, there was typically another guest or two at the dining table. Robert also recollects that he, Eliza and Margaret liked to gather armloads of peonies and weigela blossoms from their yard to honor relatives on Decoration Day. “I remember going to my grandmother’s house and putting flowers on the graves on this day. My cousins Barbara Magness and Terry Francis have continued the tradition to present date.”
Margaret adds, “Just after Terry’s wedding ceremony, she took flowers from her bouquet and put them on Mom Mom’s grave. She refused to go to the reception until that had been accomplished.” Robert also remembers that, as a child, he played hide and seek in the cemetery and played with ribbons from funeral flower arrangements.
“Daddy was a house painter and a volunteer fireman,” Margaret recalls. “I remember he was up on a ladder trying to put out a fire and they hollered to him to get down just before the roof caved in.”
Margaret never finished high school. “I missed school whenever my mother needed help, and then decided not to return at all the year I turned 16. I learned to cook by watching my mother and after I quit school, I began cooking and cleaning for other people,” she reminisces. She was married to Clifton Zimmerman in 1936.
Margaret’s grandmother, mother, father and six of her siblings are buried at Prospect Hill, only a few blocks from where they resided for so many years.