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Ancient Burying Ground

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Ancient Burying Ground

  • May 10, 2007
  • Rated 5 of 5 by zabelle from Portland, Connecticut
Ancient Burying Ground

Located just around the corner from the Old State House this is considered to be Hartford’s first cemetery. Technically this isn’t true, the first cemetery in Hartford was located about two blocks from this site. The stones from that first cemetery were used in the foundation of some of the old houses in the city.

We signed up for a guided tour of the cemetery by a local cemetery expert as part of our genealogy conference. Obviously this won’t be available to you but don’t despair, there is a brochure that you can use to do a self-guided tour.

What we learned on our tour was a lot about the stone carvers of CT and how to identify who the individual stones were carved by. The stone carvers in Connecticut developed a style of their own quite different from the carvers in Boston and Newport, where the earliest stones were ordered from.

The earliest carvers were the Griswold family of Windsor. They used Bolton stone which was a type of granite that looks like slate. It is a very durable stone and some of these very old ones have fared a lot better in the long haul than the new brownstone and sandstone ones. We found another family of carvers the Johnson's of Portland CT of special interest since I live in Portland and my friend Cindy was born in Portland. They owned the quarries for which Portland is well known from the mid 1700s through the mid-1800s.

For anyone who might be looking for their ancestors in one of these very old cemeteries, be forewarned, most of the stones have been moved to make things align better and in some cases totally moved to other sections so that at this point in time most of the stones have nothing what so ever to do with who may or may not be buried under them.

We also learned that most head stones had a matching foot stone. It gave a good idea of how tall the person who had died was. Many of these foot stones have long since disappeared since they are a nightmare for grounds keepers, making mowing very difficult. They have been very useful in some cases where the headstones no longer exist in making it possible to determine what the stone would have looked like.

There are many reproduction stones in this cemetery as well as memorial stones. There is one to Thomas Hooker who is the founder of Hartford and also a large monument in the center of the cemetery listing the head of the foundering families of Hartford. Not all of them are buried here, just memorialized. There is also a monument to the African American who were buried in this cemetery with no other markers. I was happy to hear that I am not alone in having many family members who have no stone, only about 1/3 of the population was able to afford stones in this cemetery.

From journal Historic Hartford

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