The First Governor

The Winthrop family tomb holds 11 members of the Winthrop family, including Puritan leader John Winthrop the Elder (1588-1649), the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the founder of Boston. Elected governor by the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1629 while still in England, he led the Winthrop Fleet of eleven ships and 700 colonists to the New World in 1630, landing first at Salem and then moving to Charlestown, while merchants and craftsmen established themselves on the Boston peninsula. Winthrop, who declared that the settlers would be as a City upon a hill, served a total of 13 years as governor and was regarded as religious, prudent, conscientious, and pious, though he also punished religious dissent by banishing Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson. Also buried in the Winthrop tomb are Margaret (Tyndal) Winthrop, whose letters and diaries provide insight into early Boston, their son John Winthrop the Younger, and later descendants including Fitz-William Winthrop, Waitstill Winthrop, and Adam Winthrop. Nearby, the First Church tomb contains the remains of several early ministers, including Reverend John Wilson, Reverend John Davenport, Reverend John Oxenbridge, Reverend Thomas Bridge, and Reverend John Cotton, an Anglican minister in England who emigrated to Boston in 1633 and became the colony's leading cleric before supporting the banishment of Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams. The Keayne tomb contains Captain Robert Keayne, a tailor and merchant who came from England in 1635, amassed great wealth despite Puritan suspicion of riches, recorded Reverend Cotton's sermons, left major gifts to Harvard College and Boston, established a fund for a public school, and founded the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts. King's Chapel Burying Ground contains hundreds of surviving stones and dozens of tombs from more than a thousand burials dating from 1630 into the 19th century, including early table top tombs, a large vault later converted to a children's tomb, rows of tombs added in 1715 and 1738, and burial spaces maintained in the 17th century under town arrangements that once even allowed grazing animals until that practice was banned in 1680.

Cambridge, Massachusetts · United States