Grove Street Cemetery and the City of the Dead

In seventeen ninety-four and seventeen ninety-five, yellow fever moved through New Haven. The Green, which had served as the town's burial ground for a century and a half, had run out of room. The following year, the city organized a new cemetery on Grove Street, incorporated as the New Haven Burying Ground in seventeen ninety-seven. It was the first private nonprofit cemetery in America with a planned layout, individual family plots, permanently owned, arranged in advance rather than filled as bodies arrived.

The entrance gate was built in eighteen forty-five in the Egyptian Revival style, designed by the architect Henry Austin. The lintel carries an inscription: The Dead Shall Be Raised. An eight-foot stone wall encloses three sides. Inside, fourteen Yale presidents are buried. Also buried here: Eli Whitney, who died still arguing over his cotton gin patents. Noah Webster, who spent decades writing the first dictionary of American English. Roger Sherman, the only person to sign all four of the documents that founded the United States, the Articles of Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. Walter Camp, the man who shaped American football into the game it became. Charles Goodyear, who died broke despite inventing vulcanized rubber.

Historian Peter Dobkin Hall has written that the Grove Street Cemetery represented a whole redefinition of how people viewed death and dying, a shift from the community charnel ground to the family-held plot, from the collective to the personal. The cemetery became a model that spread throughout New England and eventually across the country.

It was designated a National Historic Landmark in two thousand. The gate opens on weekdays.