Center
Cemetery
by Doris Sherrow, October 2000
On October 22 (rain date: October 29), I will be leading a walking
tour through Center Cemetery for the Portland Historical
Society. When I agreed to do this about a year ago, I knew
nothing about Center Cemetery, and its layout makes it sort of hard to
get a grasp on. Fortunately, Di Longley of the Middlesex County
Historical Society had some research materials from tours she
had given, and the late Stanley Clark had compiled a complete
listing of every grave in the oldest section, with its row number and
position, which I could study.
When Portland was first settled in the late 1600s, it had
no cemetery of its own. The dead were ferried back across the
Connecticut River to be buried in Middletown's Riverside Cemetery.
When 15-year-old Samuel Hall died in February of 1713, his influential
father, who lived at 478 Main Street, had a cemetery established on
the common ground at the end of Commerce Street, which was
considerably longer then than it is now. Young Hall became the first
settler to be buried on the east side of the river.
For years Portland families laid their loved ones to rest
there, only occasionally going back to Riverside Cemetery in
Middletown where earlier ancestors might lie. Then in 1767, a new
burying ground was established on Bartlet Street Extension. Why?
I think the answer lies in the desire of Rev. Moses
Bartlet's family and parishioners to bury him near his home and the
church he had served for 32 years. I suspect that his was the first
grave in the new cemetery. He died on December 27, 1766. On January
24, 1767 William Bartlet, his son, deeded a piece of land, which he
had recently purchased from the Wangunk Indian reservation, to the
Congregational Church for use as a burying ground.
Although Bartlet could also have been buried in the old
Commerce Street Burying Ground and moved later when Center Cemetery
became official, I suspect he was buried directly after his death in
what would become Center Cemetery. In the 1700 and 1800s, many people
were in fact buried in small family cemeteries near their homes, and
Bartlet could have been in just such a lot until his son sold the land
to the church.
For several decades after the establishment of Center
Cemetery in 1767, people tended to bury their dead in the cemetery
nearer their homes, Center for the northerners, and the Old Burying
Ground for the southerners. Then, for reasons that aren't totally clear, the Old
Burying Ground fell into disuse. Center Cemetery acquired additional
land, and the Old Burying Ground may have been filling up. The
Episcopal cemetery was also opened in the late 1820s, accommodating
many of the people who lived "downstreet." The last burial
in the old cemetery occurred in 1843, that of George Bush of 259 Main
Street.
However, the old Commerce Street Burying Ground was
sitting on top of a huge brownstone deposit. In 1870, after intense
negotiation, the Middlesex and Brainerd Quarry companies paid $6,000
to acquire the land of the old cemetery, moving the graves either to
other cemeteries, or to an addition on the Episcopal cemetery created
especially for this purpose.
In the bluster of March, 1870, surveyor William Sellew
wrote out a methodical list of all the stones in the old cemetery,
even including the ones which had become disassociated from their
graves and were leaning against walls or trees or other gravesites.
His list included about 400 people.
Records were kept of which bodies were claimed by
relatives to be buried elsewhere, and where. Families who were now
associated with the Episcopal Church moved their ancestors to the main
part of that church's cemetery. Families who were Congregationalists moved their ancestors
to Center Cemetery. Four bodies were moved to Indian Hill Cemetery in
Middletown, and one to Farm Hill Cemetery. In 1882, the unclaimed
bodies, ancestors of families who had died out or moved away, were reburied behind the Episcopal Church in the northernmost part of the
cemetery.
In 1897, the Center Cemetery Association drafted up a
booklet listing all the people buried there up to that date. That list
shows about twenty gravestones that predate the 1767 date of that
cemetery's establishment. Those would be the graves of people who were
initially buried in the Old Burying Ground, then transferred to Center
in the 1870s or -80s. However, two of those pre-1767 stones are not
included on Sellew's 1870 list of the Old Burying Ground.
They are Rev. Moses Bartlet, who died in December of
1766, and his 12-day-old son, Elihu, who died in 1742. This means they
were in Center Cemetery before 1870. Almost certainly, Bartlet was
buried in his son William's Indian meadow before it was a cemetery.
Presumably the baby's grave was transferred around the same time--its
stone fairly touches Rev.
Bartlet's.
Join us for the cemetery tour on October 22nd
(2000)!