CultureNOW - King's Chapel Burying Ground: Peter Vanderwarker

King's Chapel Burying Ground
Historic Buildings: Cemetery

Photographer
Peter Vanderwarker

Dates

Constructed, 1630

Landmark Designations

National Register of Historic Places
National Historic Landmark

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Description

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From 1630 to 1660, King's Chapel Burying Ground was Boston's only burying ground. Among those buried here are John Winthrop, Massachusetts's first Governor and Mary Chilton, who arrived aboard the Mayflower.

Watching Boston evolve can be, at times, like watching grass grow. These two photographs of King's Chapel Burying Ground, on Tremont Street near School, were made 40 years apart. Quickly, now, figure out what's changed. It's a game, like locating the hero of "Wheres Waldo?" Got it? Yes, it's the tombstone in the foreground. At some time during those 40 years, the tombstone gave up the ghost, so to speak, and flopped over. Also, a table-shaped tomb at left, which had sunk almost out of sight, has been replaced.

A couple of trees have vanished, too, although the big one in the middle is eerily unaltered. That's about it. But appearances are deceptive. Take the building at left, with the two arched windows. In 1955, it was Boston's City Hall, designed in 1865 by the marvelously named Gridley J. Fox Bryant, who was also the architect of the Charles Street Jail. Today it looks the same, but it's now Old City Hall. City government moved out in 1967. A 1970 conversion saved the building, although at the cost of slicing up its grand Hall of Aldermen and Council Chamber for private offices. There's a restaurant on the lower floors.

The burial ground is Boston's oldest. An early citizen named Isaac Johnson owned the property and was building a house on it when he died, in 1630, and was buried here. Johnson started a trend. Most of Boston's first settlers ended up in the burial ground, including several Colonial governors and a woman named Elizabeth Pain, who is thought to be the original of Hester Prynne in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. A corner of King's Chapel itself is visible at right. The first chapel was a small wood building from 1689, replaced in 1754 by the present, larger, granite version.

The Anglican congregation continued to worship in the old chapel while the new one was being erected around it. Afterward, the congregants broke up the old building and
threw it out the windows of the new one.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - King's Chapel Burying Ground", Boston Globe, 1996

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Location

Tremont Street & School Street
Boston, MA
United States

Nearby Items

King's Chapel		138 feet
King's Chapel Burying Ground Plaque		232 feet
City Carpet / Hopscotch		279 feet
Benjamin Franklin		301 feet
Old City Hall		304 feet
Josiah Quincy		343 feet
One Beacon Street		374 feet