Seventeenth Century Burials

This section of Granary Burial Ground contains some of its earliest seventeenth-century burials, including John Wakefield, whose stone dated 1667 was later carved on the back for Ann Child, and the Neal children, whose marker bears the oldest date on a gravestone, 1666, for four children of Andrew and Melicent Neal. The James Allen tomb bears the oldest date on a tomb, 1667, and held Allen’s first wife Hannah Drummer, his second wife Elizabeth Endicott, and probably his third wife Sarah Breck. Nearby are three generations of the Goose or Vergoose family, connected to the later story that Thomas Fleet first published Mother Goose tales told by his mother-in-law, though no such copy has been found and there is no record that Elizabeth Vergoose was buried here. The Freake tomb, marked with a slab set in the ground and showing a coat of arms, held John Freake, killed in a boat explosion in 1675, his wife Elizabeth, who later married Elisha Hutchinson, and Hutchinson himself. This area also includes five of the nine Massachusetts governors buried in Granary, among them William Drummer, John Endecott, Increase Summer, Richard Bellingham, and James Sullivan. The burials here also reflect Massachusetts’s colonial economy, which depended on Atlantic trade among Britain, the West Indies, Africa, and the American colonies, and included slavery, with colonial governors owning slaves and merchants such as Hugh Hall and David S. Greenough importing and selling slaves and owning plantations in the West Indies.

Cambridge, Massachusetts · United States