Point of Graves was formally established as a cemetery in 1671 on land Captain John Pickering gave to the town, though burials had taken place there earlier. Because Pickering retained the right to graze cattle on the land, many of the earliest gravestones were probably knocked down and lost. Many people important in Portsmouth's early history are buried there, including Anne Jaffrey, who died in 1682 shortly after bearing her son George Jr.; her stone, likely carved by the prolific William Mumford, is the oldest remaining there. A double stone carved by Mumford marks Elizabeth Elatson, who died in 1704-05, and Elizabeth Rogers, who died in 1704, and points to a tragedy in Reverend Nathaniel Rogers's family: his daughter Elizabeth and an African-American servant died when the Rogers house burned, and his mother-in-law Elizabeth Elatson saved his young son by throwing him from a window to Rogers but died from her injuries two months later; news of the fire in the Boston News-Letter was the first published account of a house fire in the American colonies. Also buried there are James Lovett, a bookkeeper for provincial court president John Cutts who died in 1718, whose small stone was carved by Nathaniel Emmes with the wings of the death's head curving up and over to form a heart; Jane Meserve, wife of prominent shipbuilder Colonel Nathaniel Meserve, who died in 1747 and whose large stone was carved by either Nathaniel or Caleb Lamson; and mariner John Jackson, who died in 1690-91, owned land on Little Harbor and Jackson Island in the Piscataqua River, and is marked by an unusually square stone of uncertain authorship, perhaps by John Noyes or James Foster.
