[1] Chelsea Garden Cemetery is located south east of the city's Bellingham Square civic center, and consists of a rectangular parcel about 3.2 acres (1.3 ha) in size.

It has a network of paths which wind over the undulating terrain, rising from a low point in the southeast.

Another is the Soldiers Circle at main entrance, where a number of the city's Civil War dead are buried.

With heightened awareness of sanitation and hygiene, local citizens formed a cemetery association in 1841 for a private, non-sectarian burial ground.

The first burial took place on December 7, 1841, and was a reburial of a Chelsea man who died in 1832 and had been buried in Boston.