Ye Antientist Burial Ground (New London, Connecticut)

From the burial grounds, the visitor has a broad view to the east of the Thames River and, on the far shore, the heights of Groton, Connecticut.

a grave, to be paid by survivors (Caulkins 1860, p. 111).17th century New London was yet a rough and isolated corner of early colonial Connecticut.

At least four stones dated in the 17th century have been found that could not have been placed before 1720 (Slater 1987, p. 221).If the best man in the community was struck down, his companions could do no more to testify their regret, than to lay him reverently in the grave, and seal it with a rude granite ... broken with ponderous mallets from some neighboring ledge and wearily dragged with ropes to the place and laid over the remains to secure them from disturbance, and mark the spot where a brother was buried (Prentis & Caulkins 1899, p. 6).As time wore away the unadorned burial hillocks, the older were "covered over with fresh deposits of the dead, so that the numbers here cannot be estimated by the evidences that now remain.

The oldest grave marker in the yard is dated 1662, and is a brownstone table slab by George Griswold of Windsor, Connecticut.

Many wealthy families purchased slate tombstones imported from the Boston area or coastal Rhode Island, delivered through the New London Port.

Eastern Connecticut carvers such as Josiah Manning, David Lamb, Gershom Bartlett, and Johnathan Loomis carved stones of granite schist and carvers from the Portland/Middletown region such as the Thomas Johnson Family and later generations of Stanclifts carved markers of brownstone that can be seen in the yard today.