Gravestones in this historic neighborhood near the Webhannet River preserve the history of Wells’s first English settlers in a place named by the Abenaki over a thousand years ago. Nearby stood the homestead of Edmond and Annis Littlefield, owners of the town’s first mill, and the first meetinghouse also stood here. Wells was a violent frontier in the struggle for New England, and Cotton Mather’s history of the 1692 Battle of the Storer Garrison recounts burials of native warriors at this spot. The Littlefields and many other early residents marked graves with fieldstones that have not survived, and in the early 20th century Wheelwright graves were moved to the newer Ocean View cemetery. Those buried here included Josiah Littlefield, born in 1644, who was captured in a native attack on Wells in 1708 in which his wife Lydia Masters and eldest son were killed, taken to Canada, returned to Wells to farm, and was attacked and killed again in 1712. Lieutenant Johnathan Hammond, who lived from 1644 to 1717, served as a soldier in King William’s War between France and New England and their respective Native allies, and also held civic and church offices including deacon of the First Church of Wells, selectman, clerk of writs, and deputy marshall for the province in 1686. Captain Willian Cole, a Wells shipwright who lived from 1772 to 1847, and his wife Sarah Littlefield Cole, who lived from 1771 to 1825, had two children, Mary and Samuel. Benjamin Tredwell, who lived from 1780 to 1815, was the fifth generation of the Treadwell family in Wells. The cemetery’s gravestones began as simple fieldstones, later appeared in primitive engraved forms with names only, and then were embellished with willow trees, skulls, and urns to suggest the brevity of earthly life. By the mid-1700s traveling stone carvers worked from town to town, slate was used for 150 years, marble came into use at the end of the 18th century, and after the Revolutionary War many people in Wells were buried on family land where graves could be seen from the kitchen window; more than 200 family cemeteries still survive in the town.