October 25, 2020 — It rose like the humped back of a massive beast, its hide shaggy with fallen leaves and barnacled with reddish-brown tombstones. Old Durham Cemetery has populated that hill in Durham, Connecticut, with the dirt of the dead since sometime around 1700.
It’s one of the more unique old cemeteries I’ve seen in New
England. First, most of its stones are sculpted from sandstone of that pleasant
auburn hue as opposed to the usual slate (it only has one slate tombstone). And
the images sculpted are variations on royal figures, faces wearing crowns and
surrounded by ornate touches that I assume have something to do with reigning
in Heaven but could be deeply, embarrassingly wrong. But I’m not wrong in that all
of those gravestones look like face cards from a deck of death. Some were illegible,
the soft sandstone that made those carvings possible flaking and wearing away,
but many had survived time and weather.
There were historical figures, too. Soldiers from the Lexington
Alarm (the first battle of the Revolutionary War), politicians, a 19-year-old “Indian
girl.” Each of the historic remains had a QR code on a metal stand beside it.
For those who want to see it, the cemetery is at the
intersection of Old Cemetery Road and Main Street. We went to the wrong cemetery
at first, finding ourselves at Durham Cemetery behind the Town Hall on Town
House Road, but realized fast that it was wrong when we found the age, but not
the atmosphere.
Here are some photos from Lindsey, as always capturing the atmosphere
better than anybody could.
And then here are a few from me, capturing the facts of a
place like Lindsey hates.
And then a rare panorama from Lindsey of the massive, shaggy, barnacled beast.
