In which I am better prepared

Earlier this week I was feeling tempted to go to Salem to see how insane it was the week before Halloween.  It's nearly two hours from here to there, though, so common sense prevailed in the end.  Instead I looked at my list of burying grounds/historic cemeteries in this general area and decided I could take a little time to visit the Old Hadley Cemetery, a mere quarter of an hour away.

(Maybe someday I'll visit a place in Mass that's not a cemetery.  But they're so pretty in autumn, and I'm not about to pass up the chance to see old graves.)

Old Hadley Cemetery is located on Cemetery Road, across from a cornfield and adjacent to a now-harvested field of something.  That's the road and the cornfield above, along with the blur of a leaf in the process of falling.  I found information about the cemetery, and the coordinates for directions, on Grave Addiction.  Probably three-fourths of the graves are from the late 19th and 20th centuries.  The grass was trimmed short, and though it looked a little dry, it had obviously been looked after recently.  I first stopped near where I thought there might be some old stones, but when they turned out to be 19th century I moved the Bluebird closer to where the old graves really were, which Grave Addiction tells me is the west end of the cemetery.

These oldest graves haven't been moved from anywhere else; the cemetery was established in the 17th century.  Though I'd read that before I visited, I sort of forgot about it for a while, and was therefore surprised when I came across graves from that far back.  The old section had the most trees, and therefore the most leaves on the ground, but not in a hazardous manner.  Near the short iron fence (short enough that I was prepared to get myself over it if the gates had been locked) that ran along Cemetery Road was a strange lump of a hill that turned out to be a mausoleum facing the road; you can see it on the left in the first picture on the page.  The year 1859 was carved on the lintel, but there was no sign of a family name. 

In this old section are members of some of the area's colonial families; a plaque in a rock says that Nathaniel Dickinson, who was born in England, founded Hadley in 1659 and died there in 1676.  Surrounding the rock are plenty of Dickinson graves, like that of Captain William Dickinson's at left, who died at 67 on June 24, 1742.  There are also people whose names have made it into street names in the area, like Lymans and Chileabs. 

As I made my way from the street side further back, the graves generally got older.  The ones nearest the road were late 18th century; towards the middle they were mid-18th.  I saw a 1742 death date and was excited about that until I came across a 1725.  Then there was a 1718, and then a pair of stones raised like tabletops, illegible with age but with plaques in front of them indicating that they were of Rebekah (below) and the Reverend John Russell, who died in 1688 and 1692.  Original 17th century gravestones!  There were also a few replacement markers for graves from the same era, like the one at right, but originals are so much better.  Shortly thereafter my camera's batteries gave up, but I was well satisfied. 

 

the Russells' graves at center

I was struck by the extreme simplicity of the early 18th-century stones when compared with those from the late 18th century.  Captain Dickinson's headstone just has the barest facts, carved in simple capitals with no decoration, while by the time of the Revolution most stones have more information, variation in typography, and symbolic ornaments.  Perhaps the matter-of-factness of the early headstones is a mixture of humility and austerity.

On a final note, I feel like I'm getting better at photographing graves.  It helps to try to get as level with the face of the stone as you can.  I did a lot of squats yesterday.