Myles Standish Burying Ground
During my trip to Duxbury, MA, after I had visited Alden House National Historic Site and Art Complex Museum, I stopped by Myles Standish Burying Ground, also called Old Burying Ground. This unique little cemetery claims to be the oldest maintained cemetery in the United States. The town of Duxbury has sporadically taken care of the area since the mid-17th century and named the grounds after colonial militant Myles Standish, who is said to have been buried on the grounds on October 1656. The seemingly defunct American Cemetery Association gave a commemorative plaque to the cemetery in August 1977 as part of a belated bicentennial celebration.
Early English colonists did not carve headstones and instead used wooden or plain stone markers if they wanted to denote the burial place of a loved one. Because of this, the grave of Myles Standish, along with other Mayflower passengers, was not marked. This was not considered a problem until 1858 when beloved poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (whose house I visited in 2023) wrote his best-selling poem The Courtship of Miles Standish. Victorian era readers simply had to visit the grave of the snubbed folk hero. An excavation ensued. The skeletal remains of what they believed to be Standish and several members of his family were rediscovered in 1891. The townspeople built a unique memorial with fieldstones and cannons to honor their hero. Standish’s remains were exhumed again in 1930, placed in a copper box for safekeeping, and reinterred within the memorial.
Outside of that odd story, the cemetery is fairly typical of a colonial burying ground. Currently, only 128 gravestones are visible, although up to a thousand bodies could be on the property. Paperwork was not extant in the early days of burial, so modern archaeologists used penetrating radar to find the graves. (This methodology was previously discussed on the blog with my review of the AIA Archaeology Hour presentation “Finding the Children” with Kisha Supernant.) Jonathan Alden, son of John and Priscilla Mullins, died in 1697 and has the oldest visible headstone, although the cemetery had been in operation for over fifty years prior. Burials at this cemetery ended when Mayflower Cemetery opened. A sign within the cemetery claimed the place was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2015, but it does not appear on the official and regularly updated list.
The cemetery featured the work of at least five distinct carvers. The oldest was John Noyes of Boston who worked during the late 17th and early 18th century, overlapping the career of Nathaniel Fuller of Plympton. The next generation was Ebenezer Soule of Plympton and his sons, who had great names like Ebenezer, Asaph, Coomer, and Ivory. Their angel carvings had peculiar wavy hair like the snake hair of Medusa. The third generation of cavers included prolific Bildad Washburn of Kingston, who created over seven hundred headstones in the area, and Lemuel Savery of Plymouth, who specialized in winged cherubs.
The cemetery was a quiet and relaxing walk with plenty of unique, colonial era gravestones. No parking was available at the site, and the main road was busy, but parking on the quieter side streets was not a problem. The ground of the cemetery was fairly flat but soft in some spots, which may prove difficult to navigate for some people with limited mobility. The signage was better than at most cemeteries, although seemingly not always accurate. As an added bonus, a marker to the side of the cemetery, erected in 1939 by the town of Duxbury, denoted the site of the Second Meeting House from 1706 to 1785. This is a good stop if you are already in Plymouth County and want to learn more colonial American history or are a taphophile, a lover of cemeteries.
Abby Epplett’s Rating System
Experience: 7/10
Accessibility: 7/10