Free Things to Do in Boston: The Old Granary Burying Ground

There are so many hidden free things to do in Boston during your next vacation. With some helpeful tips, you can explore some of the hidden historic gems this city has to offer.

People walk through the heart of busy, bustling, modern downtown Boston every day, never noticing the pieces of the city's past that lie so conveniently close at hand on every side. Take a couple of steps off Tremont Street near Boston Common and Park Street Church, for example, and you can almost converse with the ghosts of John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and a number of other notables from Boston's legendary early years. That's because this is the location of the Old Granary Burying Ground, a cemetery dating back to the year 1660 and one of many free things to do in Boston, over a century before independence was even a gleam in most colonists' eyes.

As the hands of time have turned, the bucolic pastures around it have evolved into towering buildings jam-packed together, with subways underneath and cars, trucks, buses, and taxis beeping and roaring by outside the gate. Yet here is a chance to step back (for free!) into that earlier Boston for just a little while.

The Granary Burying Ground was originally a part of Boston Common-the Common has been nibbled away for various purposes since its inception-and took its name from a grain warehouse that stood nearby. An earlier cemetery (at King's Chapel, dating from 1630) wasn't sufficient for the community's needs, so the first of what came to be somewhat over 2,300 early Bostonians were laid to rest here in 1660.

At first burials were conducted without using gravestones, leaving the earliest graves completely unmarked. A well-known example is Mary Dyer, hung in Boston for her Quaker beliefs in 1660 and interred here without a marker. The earliest stone, that of John Wakefield, dates from 1667. Over the ensuing years fashions in headstones changed, and a stroll among the graves reveals the different motifs on the slate markers. Early carvers used symbols of mortality, producing stones with skulls riding on the wings of death, skeletons, shovels, hourglasses, and other markings that might seem somewhat jarring to a person of 20th-century sensitivities.

One such stone is that of Mother Goose. Yes, that Mother Goose, the one of nursery rhyme fame. She died in 1690, and the rhymes and couplets that she wrote were published in 1719 by her son-in-law.

There are other people from her era buried here, of course, and reading their stones can open a window on life in early New England. Still, most visitors to Old Granary Burying Ground are particularly interested in the time of the American Revolution...and well they should be, since many of the famous and not-so-famous names associated with the struggle for independence rest here.

For instance, there's Elisha Brown. He was ordered by the British military garrison to vacate his manufactory across the street at Hamilton Place in 1769 so that soldiers could be quartered in it. He refused and holed up in the building, defying the surrounding English troops. After a siege of 17 days the British gave up, withdrew from the siege, and tacitly conceded Brown's triumph. This incident was part of the friction over the quartering of troops on the populace that was fanning the flames of colonial discontent.

On March 5th of the following year the Boston Massacre took place a few blocks away, in front of the Old State House. Those killed-rioting thugs from the British point of view, martyrs to be avenged to the revolution-minded-were buried together at Old Granary.

John Hancock, who signed the Declaration of Independence in letters so large that "King George could read it without his spectacles" lies here, as does rabble-rouser and organizer Samuel Adams, and fellow Declaration-signer Robert Treat Paine. America's renaissance man, Benjamin Franklin, isn't here (he moved on to Philadelphia after his Boston years), but his parents are. And Paul Revere, he of the famous ride and numerous other historical moments, lies in Old Granary as well.

Revolutionaries lie side-by-side with figures of the Massachusetts establishment. Peter Faneuil, the merchant who gave us Faneuil Hall, was laid to rest under a stone with his name misspelled. And the graveyard contains six Massachusetts governors: Richard Bellingham, William Dummer, James Bowdoin, Increase Sumner, James Sullivan, and Christopher Gore.

In 1840 the present gateway and the landmark Franklin family obelisk, both designed by Solomon Williams, architect of Bunker Hill Monument, were installed. They are built of granite from Quincy, hauled on the first commercial railway in America. Shortly afterwards, parts of the cemetery were "rearranged." Quite a few of the stones were moved into tidy rows that bore no relationship to the actual gravesites they represented. One reason for this apparent act of desecration is supplied by a plaque in the cemetery: the invention of the lawnmower, which required straight paths to operate properly!

In 1879 the last body was interred, in the last of 2,345 burials, in one of the underground tombs that border the graveyard. And now, in 2002, there isn't a person alive who personally remembers any of the souls who were laid to rest here. Still, the well-known and the ordinary live on in our imaginations when we wander among their graves, seeing and feeling the stones that were placed by loving hands in a bygone time, when Boston was in its formative years.

How lucky we are to be able to step back in time just by turning in at a granite gate on Tremont Street! The surrounding buildings and traffic evaporate as we visit those long gone, and enter a portion of a vanished world that still remains in the heart of today's Boston. The Granary Burying Ground is one of Boston's historical treasures, open to you any day you want to sample it.

Article provided by Homesteader