Walking Tour: The American Revolution Connections
Hartford Ancient Burial Ground
Hartford
July 1, 2025
From the gleaming white pyramids that housed the bodies of the pharaohs down to the gaudy mausoleums of today, wealth has dictated what burial looks like. That truism about what money can buy was on full display in the Ancient Burial Ground in Hartford, on a tour of various luminaries and regular people from the time of the American Revolution.
Even the name of the area is influenced by money. Take the reason we call the graveyard abutting Main and Gold streets in downtown Hartford a “burial ground” and not a “cemetery.” As our tour guide Ruth Shapleigh-Brown put it, cemeteries are for-profit enterprises where people buy lots or family tracts, and generally began appearing after the 1800s. To be placed in a burial ground, all one needed to do was pay for someone to dig the grave. Then, if they wished, they had to pay for a gravestone. Today’s gravestones can cost between $1,000 and $3,000.
Crafting gravestones was a completely different matter in the Colonial era. Quarrying and transporting stone took time, as Hartford didn’t have its own quarries in that era.
What’s more, shaping and carving gravestones was a time intensive process. During a time where most people in Connecticut were subsistence farmers, the few skilled gravestone makers reserved their work for the winter, as farming required their full attention during the warm weather months.
One of the earliest and most influential gravestone makers in the Colonies was George Griswold, who lived in Windsor. His works started off as simple gravestones with minimal writing and no adornments. As his life progressed, so did the artistry of his stones. Of course, the more ornate his gravestones became, the more expensive they became.
Even the arrangement of the burial ground itself follows the Golden Rule: Whoever has the gold, makes the rules.
The burial ground began to be used in the 1640s, shortly after Thomas Hooker and his followers arrived from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The first church in the area was built right atop the burial ground where First Church of Christ stands today.
With the construction of the holy building, a new pecking order was established. The wealthy were buried closer to the church, presumably closer to God, while the poor were relegated to the distant stretches of the burial ground. At the burial ground today, that might not seem like much distance. But the burial ground was about three times its current size in the Colonial era, so the poor had quite a walk indeed to reach the House of God.
I suppose that it follows that, even in death, human beings are treated differently according to wealth. As Shapleigh-Brown said during the tour, “Money separates everything for all time.” Today we have life insurance for the inevitability that you will not be able to afford burying yourself or your loved ones. The power of money is one of those realities that cut across time and religions, like death itself.
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