Stories from the Old Burying Ground
Wakefield’s Old Burying Ground is like an outdoor museum, filled with ‘artifacts’ reaching back to the town’s beginnings. Visitors can find the truest testament to those brave pioneers who first settled here, and their only monuments left standing.
In one way or another, the Old Burying Ground tells stories of those early settlers — their joys as well as their sorrows; their lives as well as their deaths. Through studies of the files of the Wakefield Historical Society and the Wakefield Historical Commission, it was possible to ‘resurrect’ some of their stories and, with the help of the Wakefield Item, to share them.
By NANCY BERTRAND
This undated photograph probably from the early 1930s shows the path of what would become The Floral Way, but was actually an ancient path often referred to as the County Road.
If you were to walk down this path, you see the old fence that helped preserve our gravestones for so many years. In the past 35 years, as long as we have been studying the old cemetery, the town has lost an unprecedented number of old gravestones. This was one reason that the Historical Commission petitioned to replace the historically accurate fence as part of the work on the Floral Way that has been undertaken by the Town.
As you travel down that path, you will pass an unmarked tomb which would have been the repository for bodies during the months when the ground was too frozen to dig graves. On the brow of that little mound and behind it you start to see the graves of Revolutionary War period gravestones.
Proceeding down the path, you will pass a Hartshorne family monument, which was defaced several years ago when the top of it was stolen.
Walking down this path to the bottom of the little hill, you’ll see the Sweetser tomb, which we will visit later this week. To the right of that tomb, the area would have been empty. The only gravestones you would have seen would have been that line of ancient stones that we have visited so frequently. So, where did the semi-circular arrangement of late eighteenth/early nineteenth century gravestones come from?
Join us tomorrow to find out as we count down the days to Hallowe’en with Graveyard Tales, and the stories of the people who built our town.
