Welcome to Granary Burying Ground

Granary Burying Ground, one of Boston’s oldest historic sites, holds the graves and memorials of famous, infamous, and unknown Bostonians, including seventeenth-century Puritans John Endecott and Samuel Sewall, revolutionaries Samuel Adams, John Hancock, James Otis, Paul Revere, victims of the Boston Massacre, and women such as Abiah Franklin, Mary Goose, and Ruth Carter. It also contains the resting places of nine Massachusetts governors, three signers of the Declaration of Independence, and many Revolutionary War veterans. Established by Boston town officials in 1660 because of overcrowding at King’s Chapel burying ground, it was Boston’s third graveyard and was known as the New, South, Middle, and Central Burying Ground before taking the name Granary after 1800 from a 12,000-bushel grain warehouse built in 1729 for the poor. The site stood at the edge of seventeenth-century Boston on land associated with burying grounds, the almshouse, prison, cow pen, and workhouse. Today it covers about two acres, contains 2,345 gravestones and 204 tombs, and probably received more than 8,000 burials, though many stones have decayed or been lost, burial locations were rearranged, and overcrowding led to a ban on burials outside tombs from 1856. In 1840 Solomon Willard designed its Egyptian-style gateway. Among those buried there are Boston’s first mayor, John Phillips, interred in Tomb 60, and John Smibert, the Scottish immigrant portrait painter and architect recognized as America’s first architect, buried in the Nathaniel Williams Tomb after a career that included painting prominent Bostonians and designing the original Faneuil Hall.

Cambridge, Massachusetts · United States