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Manchester's Burying Grounds
 When
Manchester was first settled near the end of the seventeenth century the
only cemetery for Orford Parish was what is known as the Ancient Burying Ground in
downtown Hartford. By 1711, the settlers east of the Connecticut River
were buried in Center Cemetery on Main Street in East Hartford.
Manchester’s first cemetery, laid out in 1740, is the West Cemetery
on Spencer Street near the entrance ramp to I-384. (Note that the
cemetery entrance was moved in 1999 from Spencer Street to the northwest
corner just beyond the I-384 on-ramp.) The first acre of East Cemetery
of on East Center Street was deeded to the town of Hartford by Thomas Pitkin in 1751. Buckland
Cemetery in Northwest Manchester became public in 1811. These three cemeteries plus the new Hillstown
Road Cemetery are maintained by the town of Manchester. Cheney
Cemetery, a two acre plot near the northeast corner of East Cemetery, is
owned by the Cheney Cemetery Association. Beth Shalom Memorial Park in the southeast
corner of East Cemetery is leased from the town.
The other religious cemeteries, St. Bridget on Oakland Street (1870),
St. James on Broad Street (1902) and St. John on Jefferson Street (1930)
were maintained by the parishes until the Archdiocese of Hartford took
over St. James and St. Bridget in 1969. The office for these and other
nearby Catholic cemeteries is at St. James Cemetery.
 East
Cemetery is by far the largest cemetery in Manchester. After remaining
as a single acre for nearly a century, it has been incrementally
enlarged to fifty-one acres. Drive through the cemetery and observe the
different types of cemetery development that occurred over the last 250
years. The first acre was next to East Center Street and has about five
hundred individual graves. The next area to the south is laid out in
rectangular plots. The area south of the cemetery office is laid out as
a "rural cemetery" following the precedent set by Mount Auburn Cemetery
in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At one time there was a pond near the
office spanned by a bridge. As the newer sections near Westminster
Street were developed, the design reverted to a rectangular layout,
presumably for ease of maintenance.
A twenty page "Self-Guided Historical Walking Tour" booklet for East
Cemetery is available from our Museum Shop for $3.00 + $3.00
Shipping & Handling.
Inscriptions on the gravestones in Manchester’s public cemeteries
were recorded by the Orford Parish Chapter of the Daughters of the
American Revolution (DAR) about 1927. Copies are not available locally
but may be found at the Rhode Island Historical Society in Providence
and at the DAR headquarters in Washington, D.C. In November 1934, all of
the cemeteries in Manchester were recorded by a Works Progress
Administration (WPA) project under the direction of Charles R. Hale and
are available at the State
Library in Hartford. For limited lookups in the Hale
Collection for Manchester, contact John Spaulding at
jjsruns@infionline.net
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