Who knew that cemeteries could be so full of life?! After a memorial service for my mother, my family and I went on a tour of this charming, historic graveyard. The slabs range from the sixteen hundreds to the present, old Halloween-like headstones, their engravings eroded beyond recognition, grand obelisks, low stone walls defining family crypts that look like ruins of ancient houses and are populated helter skelter monuments of different sizes, shapes and styles, from huge crypts to six inch high slabs marking the graves of babies. In one area a bunch of witty scientists banter on their inscriptions: One lists the dead scholar's entire curriculum vita. The one next to it says more succinctly "Nobel Laureate, etc." as if to mock his colleague's pomposity. There are marble angels and beautiful sphinxes that seem to follow you with their eyes, and one gravestone that lists a man and his two wives - or a sister - - buried together. There are famous names: Eli Whitney, Glenn Miller, Charles Goodyear, Noah Webster, Lyman Beecher, father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and prominent names, Trumbull, Goodrich, Baldwin. And there are really old gravestones moved from the New Haven Green when it was the town graveyard They lean against the stone wall that surrounds the cemetery.
Wear comfortable shoes because you'll be walking down wooded paths. read more
