King's Chapel Burying Ground
King's Chapel Burying Ground, located on Tremont Street in Boston, Massachusetts near its intersection with School Street, stands as the oldest cemetery in Boston, established in 1630. Virtually all of the first inhabitants of Boston were buried here, making it a foundational site of colonial American history. Though situated immediately adjacent to King's Chapel, the burying ground belongs to the City of Boston, which has maintained the space for nearly 400 years. Today it draws visitors from across the country and around the world, functioning simultaneously as a historic landmark, an open-air museum of early American funerary art, and a quiet refuge amid the bustle of downtown Boston.
History and Establishment
The King's Chapel Burying Ground was established in 1630, the same year Boston itself was founded as a Puritan settlement. As the first burial ground for Puritan settlers in the new city, it served as the primary resting place for Boston's earliest population.[1] At a time when Tremont Street was still a rough path at the edge of a nascent colonial town — some 357 years before modern accounts described its bustle — this ground received the remains of nearly every prominent and ordinary resident alike.[2]
The Puritan founders who created the settlement that would become Boston brought with them strong religious convictions about community, mortality, and the marking of graves. The burying ground reflects those values in its layout and the nature of its earliest markers. Because it predates the construction of King's Chapel itself — which was built adjacent to it decades later — the cemetery's name is something of a historical accident, derived from its most prominent neighbor rather than from any original ecclesiastical connection.
The ownership and stewardship of the burying ground has remained with the City of Boston rather than with any religious institution. King's Chapel, the congregation that eventually occupied the building next door, has clarified this distinction explicitly: the burying ground belongs to the city, which has maintained the space for nearly 400 years.[3] This arrangement has shaped how the site is governed, preserved, and made accessible to the public.
Location and Setting
The cemetery occupies a plot on Tremont Street, near Boston Common, in the heart of downtown Boston. It sits close to the intersection of Tremont and School Streets, placing it within walking distance of several other significant historic sites, including the Old Granary Burying Ground, which lies further along Tremont Street.[4] Together, these two burial grounds form part of Boston's Freedom Trail, a marked walking route that connects many of the city's most significant colonial and revolutionary-era sites.
Despite its urban surroundings, the King's Chapel Burying Ground functions as what observers have described as a peaceful enclave amid the surrounding activity of a major American city.[5] Visitors entering through its iron gates often find a marked contrast between the noise and pace of the financial and government district around it and the quietude of the burial ground's shaded interior. Ancient slate gravestones, many tilted with age, stand in rows across the grounds. Some markers bear carved imagery characteristic of colonial New England funerary art — winged skulls, hourglasses, and other symbols of mortality that were common on Puritan grave markers.
The adjacency of the burying ground to King's Chapel creates an architectural juxtaposition that underscores the site's historical layering. The chapel building, constructed of stone, looms over the cemetery's perimeter, and guided walking tours frequently incorporate both the building and the burying ground as complementary stops.[6]
Notable Burials and Historical Significance
The King's Chapel Burying Ground holds the remains of many figures central to early Boston and colonial American history. Because virtually all of the first inhabitants of Boston were interred here, it contains a cross-section of the city's founding generation — clergy, civic leaders, merchants, soldiers, and ordinary residents who lived and died in the earliest decades of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.[7]
The burying ground is also connected to later periods of Boston's history through burials and commemorations associated with figures from the colonial and revolutionary eras. The site has been referenced in accounts of Boston's broader historical landscape, including discussions of figures such as William Dawes, a participant in the events of April 1775, whose remains were at one point moved from the King's Chapel Burying Ground to a plot at Forest Hills Cemetery that belonged to the family of his first wife.[8] This act of reinterment reflects the ways in which the burying ground has been treated not as a static site but as a living part of Boston's evolving relationship with its past.
The gravestone inscriptions and carved imagery in the burying ground also serve as a record of shifting attitudes toward death and the afterlife in Puritan New England. Early stones frequently emphasize mortality and the transience of earthly life, consistent with the theological concerns of the settlers who established the cemetery. Later stones from the eighteenth century sometimes reflect a softening of imagery, as the carved faces on markers gradually transition from skull-like forms to more angelic visages — a shift that historians of American material culture have associated with changing religious sensibilities in the region.
Visitors and Public Access
The King's Chapel Burying Ground draws a steady stream of visitors throughout the year. As an outdoor site on a major urban thoroughfare, it is accessible to the general public and does not require admission to enter. Groups of tourists, school groups, and independent travelers regularly move through the grounds, consulting maps, reading gravestone inscriptions, and participating in organized walking tours.
Visitors have been documented coming from considerable distances specifically to see the site. Accounts of visitors at the burying ground on a single Friday morning, for example, have described scores of people present, including travelers from Texas and other states far from New England.[9] This level of visitation reflects the burying ground's status as an anchor site on the Freedom Trail and its role in Boston's substantial heritage tourism industry.
Organized tour companies, including ghost tour operators, have incorporated the King's Chapel Burying Ground into their programming. Given its age, its dense concentration of colonial-era graves, and its atmospheric setting in the middle of a modern city, the site lends itself to tours focused on Boston's history and folklore.[10] These tours typically operate in the evening and draw on the long tradition of associating old burial grounds with Boston's storied past.
Preservation and Stewardship
The preservation of the King's Chapel Burying Ground presents ongoing challenges common to colonial-era burial grounds throughout New England. The slate gravestones that make up much of the marker inventory are vulnerable to weathering, acid rain, and the freeze-thaw cycles of the Boston climate. Over time, inscriptions become harder to read and some stones have cracked, toppled, or been repositioned. The city's role as steward of the grounds means that preservation decisions are made through municipal rather than ecclesiastical channels, a governance structure that has influenced the pace and nature of conservation work.
The burying ground's proximity to high pedestrian and vehicular traffic on Tremont Street also presents preservation concerns. Vibration from traffic, the presence of large numbers of visitors walking through the grounds, and the environmental conditions of an urban setting all place stresses on a site that contains irreplaceable historical material.
Efforts to document, photograph, and transcribe the inscriptions on the gravestones have been undertaken by historians, genealogists, and preservation organizations over many decades. Such documentation serves both scholarly purposes and the practical needs of family researchers seeking information about ancestors buried at the site. The burying ground is listed as a historic site in recognition of its significance to American history, and its position on the Freedom Trail ensures that it receives a degree of sustained public and institutional attention.
Cultural and Civic Role
Beyond its function as a burial site, the King's Chapel Burying Ground occupies a distinct place in Boston's civic and cultural identity. It is among the physical anchors of the city's colonial heritage, a period that Boston has historically emphasized in its public presentation of itself to residents and visitors alike.[11] Along with sites such as the Old South Meeting House, Faneuil Hall, and the Paul Revere House, it contributes to a landscape of memory that frames the city's understanding of its own origins.
The burying ground also serves an important educational function. Students of American history, architecture, material culture, and genealogy find in it a concentrated archive of primary evidence about early colonial life. The carved stones are original artifacts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, produced by craftsmen who worked in Boston and the surrounding region. Reading them closely reveals not only biographical information but also the aesthetic conventions, religious concerns, and social hierarchies of the communities that created them.
For many Bostonians, the burying ground represents continuity — a place where the earliest layers of the city's history remain physically present and publicly accessible in the middle of a twenty-first century metropolis. Its continued maintenance by the City of Boston, nearly four centuries after its establishment, speaks to the durability of the commitment to preserving the material traces of the city's founding generation.