A closer look
Graveyards in Colonial New England
How do seventeenth- and eighteenth-century gravestones reveal white New England residents’ views about family, religion, and community?
by Anne Valk, Graduate Center, CUNY
Historical Context
Many burial grounds dating back to the seventeenth century still stand throughout New England, including private graveyards on family or church land, and public graveyards maintained by towns. For historians, these graveyards offer intriguing information about the lives of those who were buried and their survivors. Similar visual motifs appeared in graveyards throughout the region, although the size, design, and placement of stones varied depending on the carver’s level of skill, the wealth of those left behind, and the role of the deceased individual in their family and community. Thus by studying the icons and inscriptions on gravestones, as well as the placement of stones within burial grounds, historians can understand community beliefs, familial relationships, and the conditions under which residents lived.
But burial grounds, like all sources of historical evidence, offer limited information. Although they have an illusion of permanence, over time gravestones become worn, removed, relocated, or vandalized. Even more crucially, many people’s graves were never marked with a carved stone. This included enslaved people, those too impoverished to afford an engraved marker, and Quakers, whose religious beliefs banned gravestones as a form of vanity and hierarchy.
This stone marks the 1697 burial of Ruth Carter in Boston’s Granary Burying Ground. The graveyard started in the 1660s, making it one of Boston’s oldest. Along with noting Carter’s approximate age, the headstone names her husband, suggesting the importance of this relationship. The headstone provides two years for Carter’s death—1697 and 1698—because two different calendar systems were used at the time, the Julian calendar, and the Gregorian calendar. This meant the gravestones of many individuals who died between January 1 and March 25, including Carter, contained two different years of death.
Gravestones marked the deaths of individuals but they were created by and for the living. It is likely that Carter’s husband or children arranged for the stone’s creation and it demonstrates how they wanted to remember her. In addition, the words and design reflected the community’s social and religious ideas about life, death, and ways to appropriately commemorate the deceased. Puritans rejected religious symbolism, believing it was a form of idolatry. Instead, references to skeletons and human bodies stressed death’s inevitability.
This stone marks the grave of Henery Allen, deacon of the First Church of Christ in Boston. Allen was buried in Boston’s Granary Burying Ground, along with many of the city’s prominent residents. The image of a skull with wings, sometimes accompanied by crossed bones or a coffin, was popular on gravestones at this time. The same symbol appears in the 1695 grave of Joseph Bernard in Deerfield, Massachusetts (seen above).The winged death head and straightforward reference to the body of the deceased (“here lyeth buried the body”) depicted residents’ views about death: graveyards contained only empty vessels after spirits departed for an afterlife of salvation or damnation.
Little is known about the identities of those who carved colonial-era gravestones. Generally, they were local men, often working at other trades, including blacksmiths and leather workers, and they made use of stones quarried nearby. Each carver had a distinct style, but they used similar images and iconography. The intricate scrolls that lined Allen’s gravestone showed the carver’s high level of skill. The scrolls probably referred to Allen’s position as a deacon.
Stop and Look
Compare the graves of Ruth Carter and Henery Allen. Both were buried in Boston’s Granary Burial Ground in the 1690s and their gravestones were photographed in 1924:
How do the gravestones describe the deceased?
What do the stones suggest about the community’s ideas about what happened after death?
What else do you notice about the different ways that each family wanted to remember them after death?
What else can you observe about the cemetery from these photos?
By the eighteenth century, New England residents’ views about death separating the body from the soul changed, and churches began to preach that deceased individuals could be reunited in the afterlife. The changing ideology was reflected in the language and images appearing on gravestones.
This stone commemorated Captain Elisha Chapin, who died in July 1756 at Fort Massachusetts. The stone appears in a graveyard in Springfield, Massachusetts, about fifty miles east of the place where he died. When Chapin’s survivors arranged for his gravestone, they included his military title. In describing the alleged cause of his death, the stone revealed the community’s hostile views toward the area’s Indigenous people and implied that Chapin had died while acting honorably to protect the colonial outpost.
Elisha Chapin’s wife, Meriam, who died nearly fifty years after her husband, is also remembered on this gravestone. Meriam’s name appears at the bottom of the marker, where she is described as Elisha’s “relict” (which meant his widow). The paired heads and the text on the stone suggest the family waited until after Meriam’s death to add this marker to the graveyard. However, the placement of Meriam’s name and the lack of additional information stress her perceived insignificance relative to her husband.
Both Chapins are depicted using a winged face that is less realistic than the earlier skulls and coffins. Rather than marking the site of their decaying bodies, the stone serves as a place to remember.
Changing views of death also can be seen in this 1785 gravestone from a cemetery in rural Deerfield, Massachusetts.
Throughout the colonial era, childbirth was risky for women, and many children died in infancy. The unusual design demonstrates the stone carver’s skilled hand and conveys the sorrow felt after the death of Mary Harvey and her infant. The coffin image and the text highlight the significance of burying Harvey and her child together. By noting Mary’s relationship to her husband and child, the grave suggests the depths of grief experienced by her family and their desire to imagine mother and child together in the afterlife.
Stop and Look
Compare the stones marking the graves of Ruth Carter (died in 1698) and Mary Harvey (died in 1785).
What differences do you notice in the ways their families remembered them after their death?
How are the images and words on their stones different?
How might you explain those differences?
Reflection Questions
Looking at both the words and the designs, what do gravestones reveal about white Americans’ understanding of death in colonial New England? How did those views change over time?
In what ways do gravestones reveal gender roles and sex differences in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? What other differences do you observe?
What valuable evidence do graveyards contain for learning about the past? What are their limitations as sources?
Additional Reading
James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life (New York: Doubleday Books, 1977, 1996).
Gaynell Stone, “Sacred Landscapes: Material Evidence of Ideological and Ethnic Choice in Long Island, New York, Gravestones, 1680–1800,” Historical Archaeology 43 no. 1 (2009): 142–59.
Erik R. Seeman, Speaking with the Dead in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
Related Chapters
Family Labor and the Growth of the Northern Colonies, 1640-1760Related Items
Burial Ground in Deerfield, Massachusetts, circa 2005Ruth Carter Gravestone
Henery Allen Gravestone
Elisha and Meriam Chapin Gravestone
Mary Simeon Gravestone