Thomas Ridgeway Holmes was born in 1816 and died in 1859, and that is the sum of what Father Pitt knows about him. He has no presence on the Internet, as far as Google can tell—except an occasional reference to this monument. But he must have been rather wealthy: his monument suggests that he dealt in shipping and in geared and belted machines of some sort—a sawmill, perhaps? The reliefs are eroded, but it looks like a circular saw to the left of the second picture below. Is the hexagon a ship’s wheel? Then perhaps his business was shipbuilding, and it all fits together.
