Lessons Lurk In The Graveyard

Martha Townsend was laid to rest in Grove Street Cemetery 225 years ago this fall — becoming the first person to be interred in downtown’s foliage-dappled, history-rich burial ground.

Since then, thousands of notable New Haveners have joined her. They have left behind wisdom of the ages that remains relevant today.

As the cemetery marks its quasquibicentennial next week, the Independent took a Halloween-adjacent tour of the site with expert local taphophile Mike Morand with a focus on just what keeps this city of the dead so alive in New Haven’s past, present and future.

Morand, director of community engagement at Yale’s Beinecke Library and president of the New Haven Free Public Library Foundation, chairs the board of directors for a group called the Friends of the Grove Street Cemetery.

Remembering the stories of the people buried at Grove Street — as well as that of the founding of the national-landmark cemetery itself — is essential to understanding New Haven history, Morand said as he walked amidst centuries-old slate-gray headstones and beneath the radiant yellow leaves of ginkgo trees.

“If we don’t tell our stories,” he asked, ​“how will we know it’s ours?”

“The cemetery gives us a sense of common groundedness,” he added.

By holding the bones of Yale presidents and Amistad captives, of 20th-century Nobel Prize-winning chemists and 19th-century local Black church leaders, Grove Street helps bridge the town-gown divide while serving as a public place for reflection for all New Haveners.

Or, as Grove Street Cemetery Superintendent A. Seeley Jennings put it while smoking a cigar and leaning back in his office chair with his daily cemetery companion-pup Tee on his lap, this still-active burial ground continues to captivate because ​“it’s so historical.” 

For the roughly 20,000 people already buried at Grove Street as well as for the 100 or so who are newly interred each year, he added with a smile and a puff, ​“it’s the only permanent real estate you’ll ever have.”

"A Site Of Pilgrimage & Memory"

What’s the story behind this now 225-year old city of the dead? And who are some of the residents who make it such a remarkable fixture of downtown New Haven?

Grove Street Cemetery is ​“the oldest publicly chartered burial ground” in the country, Morand said. It’s a federally recognized national historic landmark not because of ​“who’s buried here,” but rather because of what it is — a pioneering planned burial ground with deep ties to this country’s colonial era.

Throughout the mid- and late-18th century, he said, the colonial settlers of New Haven buried their dead in a relatively informal fashion in churchyards and home plots in and around the Green. 

Spurred on in large part by a surge in deaths thanks to the yellow fever epidemics of 1794 and 1795, then‑U.S. Sen. James Hillhouse ​“called people together in 1796 to charter a burial ground. It was laid it out as a city of the dead with streets” and dedicated plots for families, church members, Yale affiliates, Black city residents, and so-called ​“strangers” — a term for those from out of town who died while in New Haven.

At its founding, the cemetery stood ​“on the outskirts of [New Haven’s] nine squares,” Morand said. Hillhouse and its founders designed it as ​“a site where the stories of the past would be preserved … as a site of pilgrimage and memory.”

Hundreds of headstones were moved from the Green to Grove Street Cemetery in the decade after the state issued the cemetery’s charter in October 1797. (The Green-buried bodies, numbering in the thousands, remained in place.)

And on Nov. 9, 1797, Martha Townsend — a foremother of the illustrious New Haven Townshend family — became the first person to be buried at the newly opened graveyard.

"The Stone That The Builder Refused"

Morand said that the entrance to the cemetery used to be a bit closer to what is now Prospect Street. In the mid-19th century, with the construction of the Egyptian Revival-style, Corinthian-verse-bearing gate designed by Henry Austin, the entry point for the graveyard moved further up to where High Street now runs.

That change in entrance made a plot of the cemetery previously reserved for early-19th century Black residents and dead ​“strangers” the focal point of Grove Street. A fortuitous shift in emphasis, Morand said, as, to paraphrase the Bible and Bob Marley, this ​“area of early Black burials” which at the cemetery’s founding was ​“the stone that the builder refused is now the head cornerstone.”

Included in this section of the cemetery is the burial plot of Alexander Du Bois, the grandfather of the great American sociologist, historian, and civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois, who was also one of the founding members in the mid-19th century of New Haven’s St. Luke’s Episcopal Church.

Nearby is the obelisk tombstone of John Creed, an early 19th century leader of ​“free Black New Haven” and an agent and salesman of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s paper, the Liberator. Buried alongside him are his son Cortlandt, the first Black graduate of Yale’s medical school, and his wife Vashti, who was the city’s first Black school teacher. 

Just a few feet away is the burial plot of William Grimes, the author of the first fugitive slave autobiography from 1825. His Grove Street grave marker — along with the archival and documentary work of his great-great-great-granddaughter Regina Mason — is yet another example of what Hillhouse intended this cemetery to be, Morand said: ​“a site of memory and active history.”

Every stone that Morand stopped at in this section of early Black New Haven burials pulled forth an equally rich thread of this city’s, and this country’s, history.

Here lies Sarah Oson, another leader of early 19th-century Black New Haven whose husband Jacob gave an 1817 talk in this city entitled ​“A Plea For Truth.” Morand described Oson as a​“proto-Pan Africanist,” and said his 1817 address in New Haven is widely considered to be​“the first statement claiming positive Black identity by an African American.”

And here, Morand continued, lies Bias Stanley, one of the leaders of what would become the Dixwell Congregational Church who in 1814 co-authored with William Lanson a letter to the state legislature decrying Black New Haveners’ being taxed by the government without being allowed to vote.

“Give us the right to vote or stop taxing us,” Morand summarized the message of that letter. 

While that letter ultimately led to the Connecticut legislature legally banning all Black people from voting in the state — a prohibition that would not be repealed until after the Civil War in 1870 — Morand described Stanley’s co-authored protest as ​“a story of extraordinary courage and ferocity,” particularly given that slavery was still legal in Connecticut at the time that he wrote it.

And here, Morand said, lies Ebenezer Bassett, whom President Ulysses S. Grant tapped in 1869 to be the ambassador to Haiti, making him the first Black man in this country to serve in such a diplomatic role.

“Black history,” Morand said, ​“is New Haven history, is American history.”

"I've Been Here Thousands Of Times"

Moving beyond the early Black burial section of the cemetery, Morand said that Bassett’s nearby headstone ​“leads on threads ambassadorial” to the resting place of another former diplomat — and former Yale president — Kingman Brewster.

Brewster was the university’s president from 1963 to 1977. He then served as U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1977 to 1981.

Brewster led the university with a strong faith in meritocracy, Morand said, overseeing Yale’s opening up of undergraduate admissions to women and as well as a significant increase in admissions of students of color. Brewster did not want to ​“preside over a finishing school on the Long Island Sound,” Morand said, quoting the late president.

Morand circled Brewster’s burial plot, admiring the yellow-blooming witch hazel planted at its edge, as he read the stone inscription around the former Yale president’s grave: ​“The presumption of innocence is not just a legal term. In commonplace terms it rests on that generosity of spirit which assumes the best, not the worst of the stranger.”

Morand has been visiting the Grove Street Cemetery since he first arrived in New Haven to attend Yale University in the early 1980s. He said that his love of burial grounds dates back to his childhood, when he and his father would regularly explore old cemeteries in Northern Kentucky and Greater Cincinnati. A favorite was the Spring Grove Cemetery and Arboretum near his high school.

“I came to New Haven full of taphophilia,” he said. ​“I can remember walking here [at Grove Street] in my first months at Yale.” Back when the cemetery celebrated its bicentennial 25 years ago, he was one of the founding members of the Grove Street friends group that he now chairs.

“I imagine I’ve been here thousands of times,” he said.

Checking In On Sam

That personal connection to the Grove Street burial ground stretches beyond his love of New Haven history and his own memories of walking its shaded, colorful, carefully laid out paths.

As Grove Street is still an active cemetery, Morand said, he increasingly knows more and more people buried in one of his favorite New Haven locations.

Included on that list is Sam Slie, whom Morand counted as a mentor. 

Slie grew up in the Dixwell Congregational Church, Morand said. He fought in the segregated U.S. army during World War II to ““help liberate Italy.” He attended the Yale Divinity School upon returning to New Haven, and was a longtime and much-loved minister in the United Church of Christ. 

“Sam was a great, proud Black New Havener” whom he met through Yale’s Dwight Hall, Morand said. 

He was also a ​“great, proud part of [New Haven’s] Italian community,” was fluent in Italian, and traveled back to Italy after World War II to help that country rebuild.

Morand remembered meeting up with Slie every week for lunch and conversations — usually at the Marchegian Society in the Hill — while the latter mentored Morand during his own time at Yale Divinity School. 

He was ​“a great friend,” Morand recalled. ​“I come and see Sam all the time” at Grove Street.

"Don't Worry Too Much About Fame"

Morand could have kept going from stone to stone to stone, with plenty more stories personal and historical to share. But this reporter had a deadline to meet. So Morand wrapped up the day’s tour with an ​“editorial” stop, and another to remind one to be humble.

The first was a centuries-old headstone for Abel Morse.

Morand pointed out the decorative, angelic heads at the top of the stone that were familiar to the iconography of Colonial New England.

Then he leaned over and pointed to the words ​“Mach 1795”. An upward pointing arrow was engraved beneath the ​“c” and the ​“h” of the month name. And, above the word is now a levitating letter ​“r.”

All writers make typographical mistakes, Morand recognized. Even library workers like himself and — yes, it’s true — reporters for the Independent.

But with this tombstone, Morand said with a smile, the author’s typo was ​“literally a matter of life and death.”

Looping back towards the cemetery’s entrance, Morand stopped by the burial place of Theophilus Eaton.

Eaton was one of the founding political leaders of this city and the first colonial governor of the New Haven colony in the 1600s. ​“He’s a big guy,” Morand said. But he is now barely remembered except by history buffs and academics.

Inscribed on his tombstone are these words: ​“Eaton so famed, so wise, so meek, so just / The Phoenix of our world here hides his dust / The name forget, New England never must.”

A reminder, Morand said with another smile: ​“Don’t worry too much about fame.”