The Ancient Burying Ground: Five Thousand Buried, Four Hundred Stones

Behind the Center Church on Main Street, tucked between office towers and the sounds of downtown Hartford, lies the oldest historic site in the city. The Ancient Burying Ground was established in sixteen forty, just four years after Thomas Hooker's congregation arrived on the Connecticut River. Between that year and the early eighteen hundreds, between five thousand and six thousand people were buried here, wealthy merchants and indentured servants, colonial magistrates and enslaved people, soldiers, immigrants, and children.

Only about four hundred gravestones survive. The oldest legible one belongs to Timothy Stanley, who died in sixteen forty-eight. The stones that remain document two centuries of changing attitudes toward death and carving: early slates with winged skulls giving way to neoclassical urns, carved willows, and inscriptions that grow more personal and sentimental as the decades advance.

Not all of the buried are marked. Ongoing research by the project called Uncovering Their History has identified evidence of African and Native American burials here, people whose graves were never given permanent stones or whose stones were lost as the city built up around them. The burying ground is now about three acres, down from its original size as surrounding development encroached across two centuries.

It is maintained by the Ancient Burying Ground Association, which offers walking tours and has worked to clean and stabilize the remaining stones. To stand here, among the oldest graves in Connecticut, is to stand at the founding layer of a city, to recognize that Hartford's four centuries of history include not just the famous names, but the many thousands whose names have very nearly been lost.