Dr. Samuel Bean and the Bean Puzzle Tombstone

The headstone you see above stands in Rushes Cemetery in Wellesley, Ontario. Underneath are buried Henrietta Bean and Susanna Bean, who were not sisters, but the first two wives of Samuel Bean. The women did not know each other, yet share a grave. But what is all that cryptic writing? The stone sat for more than 100 years while people tried to decipher the code. So many took rubbings that the stone became illegible and had to be replaced. Finally the code was cracked in the 1970s. You can read what it says at Atlas Obscura. 

But why did Dr. Bean bury two wives in the same grave? He married Henrietta in 1865, and she died that same year after seven months of marriage. No cause of death was recorded. The next year, Bean married Susanna, who died after only ten months of marriage. Again, no cause of death was recorded. Samuel Bean married a third time and had five children, but by then he'd given up practicing medicine and became a man of the cloth. A bit of historical digging shows that Dr. Bean may not have been a qualified physician at all, which raises more questions than it answers. -Thanks, WTM! 

(Image credit: Mac Armstrong)