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
nearest 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)!
