Center Burying Ground, later known as Historic Center Cemetery, was authorized in 1709 by Hartford Township as the second cemetery east of the Great River, after what is now the Ancient Burying Ground in downtown Hartford. Though run by Hartford’s Third Parish, it was never a church cemetery. It began as one acre, now the northwest corner, purchased in 1710 from John Pantry, and its first burial that year was Thomas Thrill. The oldest existing stone, a brownstone, marks Obadiah Wood (1648-1712), and both men were veterans of the Narragansett or King Phillip’s War (1675-76). Over the 1800s, additional land brought the cemetery to more than 12 acres, including Fort Hill on the southeast side, once fortified with palisades by the indigenous Podunk Indians against raids by the Mohegans. The original entrance was at the northeast corner of the old section rather than on Main Street. Early graves were placed with little orderly arrangement or family grouping, with headstones and inscriptions facing the rising sun in the east and caskets buried between them and smaller footstones often marked only with the initials of the dead. The earliest caskets were carried on pallbearers’ shoulders in relays according to distance, and later a road was added for carriages while grazing calves and sheep kept the grass short. In the Victorian period, the cemetery was reorganized into the current road grid system, and to accommodate the new roads, the Main Street entrance, and grass mowing, most tombstones, though not the bodies, were lined up in neat rows with footstones placed behind them. Atop the hill, a civic space was created for the town’s 1868 Civil War Monument and annual Memorial Day ceremonies. The cemetery has about 5,650 still existing gravestones, all on computerized record, has long been sold out, and funerals there are increasingly rare.