Suffield's Old Center Cemetery, one of the town's oldest historic sites surviving from the late 1600s, is overseen by the First School Society and contains a rich variety of stone from colonial quarries along the Connecticut River Valley, including reddish sandstone from Windsor, brownstone from Longmeadow, and softer brownstone from East Middletown, present-day Portland. It preserves the work of early New England stonecutters including George Griswold, Thomas Johnson, Gershom Bartlett, Joseph Johnson, and the unidentified carver known as "The Bat." Colonial gravestone carvers used local materials, and gravestones, especially costly tablestones, were signs of affluence; the tablestones here, like others in the Connecticut River Valley, convey prominence with limited decorative art. The cemetery shows the development of gravestone art from the plain style associated with craftsmen such as George Griswold, whose Windsor stone work gravestone scholar Dr. Caulfield in Markers VIII called representative of native American art, to early eighteenth-century death's heads that reminded viewers of mortality, including many stones by "The Bat" and what many believe was his best stone, carved for Lydia Gay of Suffield in 1757. During the Great Awakening in the middle of the eighteenth century, carvers began using winged cherubs and angel's heads to symbolize the soul's ascension to heaven, and scholars identify carvers through these figures, letter forms, and probate records, including a 1756 record cited by Dr. Caulfield in Markers VIII in which Joseph King of Suffield paid Joseph Johnson £1-16-0, presumably as a final payment for a gravestone. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, New England carvers shifted to neoclassical columns, urns, and willows reflecting classical republican ideology and the Age of Enlightenment, and in the Victorian era cemetery design moved toward bucolic settings, with Woodlawn Cemetery, established on Bridge Street in 1873, serving as a model for that trend. The Old Center Cemetery also includes obelisks made by the influential nineteenth-century businessman John G. Batterson, a brownstone monument erected by the First Congregational Church in 1858 to honor Reverend Benjamin Ruggles, a replica of Suffield's first meeting house, and a fieldstone with plaque commemorating the scores of colonial Africans buried there, recalling a burial area identified by historian Hezekiah Spencer Sheldon in an 1885 article.