Kings Chapel Burying Ground

This guide to Kings Chapel Burying Ground centers on a moment around 1810, when the historian Nathaniel Ingersoll Bowditch watched a cemetery superintendent quietly rearrange the headstones into neat, tidy rows for Bostonians strolling past on Tremont Street. It follows what that meant for the roughly one thousand people believed to be buried here since 1630, when this was Boston's only cemetery for its first thirty years, and for the five hundred eighty-six markers now packed onto a plot smaller than half an acre. Bowditch warned that a mourner's tears might now be falling over the wrong grave entirely.