Phipps Street Burial Ground Tour and Cleanup Set for Saturday

The Charlestown Preservation Society will lead a guided tour and cleanup of the historic Phipps Street Burying Ground from 10 a.m. to noon. 

Carol Bratley, a longtime Charlestown resident who's researched the Burying Ground extensively, will lead the tour. The event is free. Participants should meet at the Burying Ground, on the corner of Phipps and Lawrence Streets. If it rains, the event will be rescheduled for the same time on May 14.

The Preservation Society sent Patch the following background on the Burying Ground:

The Phipps Street Burying Ground is a little gem of Charlestown history tucked between the Zelma Lacey House and Mishawum Park. It dates from the 1630s and is the final resting place of the rich, the poor and the in-between.

The site is one of a handful of 17th Century cemeteries in Boston and is on the National Register of Historic Places. In the 1640s it was known as Burial Hill and was bordered on the south and west by marshy flats, with an estuary of the Charles River lapping at its edges. 

A 19th Century historian called it “a multitude of low stones huddled together in great confusion.” Among them you'll find the gravestones of influential Charlestown families with names like Frothingham, Hurd, Phipps, Russell, Hunnewell, Carey and Samson. Ebenezer Breed and the Bunker family -- for whom Breed's and Bunker Hill are named -- are buried here.

There's a monument to John Harvard of university fame, plus gravestones of a young smallpox victim and of Prince Bradsteet, “an honest man of color.”

More than 150 of the stones predate 1700.  Maud Russell's gravestone is the oldest: she died in 1652. Phineas Pratt, who came to New England in 1622 as one of the original settlers of the Wessagusset colony, was buried here in 1680: he died at age ninety. 

Also here are Thomas Beecher, captain of one of the ships that carried John Winthrop's little band of Puritans to the New World in 1630, and Nathaniel Gorham, a signer of the Constitution and president of the Continental Congress.

At the summit is a granite obelisk commemorating John Harvard, whose library of 300 books began the Harvard College library.  The exact location of his grave is unknown:  his gravestone may have disappeared during the Revolution and become a threshold for the British barracks on Bunker Hill.

The fortunes of the burying-ground have varied. Unlike most early cemeteries, the Phipps gravestones are in their original positions:  they survived nineteenth-century cemetery “beautification” campaigns that threatened to tidy them into orderly rows.

But many stones are damaged, and several have been altered. Elizabeth Phillips' headstone originally called her a midwife who, “by ye Blessing of God has Brought into this world above 3,000 Children."  At some point the number was changed to 13,000. On Mercy Ketell's stone, the date of death was changed from 1692 to 1622, seven years before Charlestown was settled.

The burying ground's low point was in May 1986 when vandals cut through the locks on the gate, burned a car in the cemetery, broke into a burial vault and “…held skeletons up and danced with them, then removed the teeth and threw them around.”

Today the burying ground is recognized as an important cultural resource and is under the care of the City of Boston. The gates are opened only on request.

For another piece of history on the graveyard, check out Patch's own