Fairfield, CT’s Old Burying Ground is History in Stone

Just off Beach Road in Fairfield, Connecticut, lies one of the town’s most quietly historic places: the Old Burying Ground. Though Fairfield was first laid out in 1639, this cemetery appears to have been formally established around 1685. The earliest surviving gravestone, marked “1687 S.M.,” is believed to belong to Samuel Morehouse, a county marshal and lieutenant. Many of the original graves are unmarked today—lost to time, earth, or reuse in early masonry.

As gravestone design evolved in the 1700s and 1800s, symbols like winged skulls, weeping willows, urns, and cherubs began to appear—reflecting changing ideas about death, memory, and the value placed on individual lives.

The Old Burying Ground is also the final resting place of some of Fairfield’s most influential early residents. Samuel Penfield, who operated the Sun Tavern on the Fairfield Green, once hosted President George Washington during his 1789 tour of New England. Thaddeus Burr, a wealthy landowner and political figure, welcomed a who’s who of Revolutionary America to his Fairfield mansion—Washington, Franklin, John Adams, and Lafayette among them. His home was even the site of John Hancock’s wedding before it was burned by British troops in 1779.

Other prominent names interred here include Eunice Burr, Andrew and Hannah Wakeman, and Jonathan Sturges—a Yale-educated lawyer, Continental Congress delegate, U.S. Representative, and Connecticut Supreme Court justice.

Some headstones tell stories of deep personal loss. Captain Ebenezer Bartram, another Fairfield figure buried here, mourned the death of his son, who was lost at sea at the age of 28 while returning from the West Indies. His grief, like so many others buried in this ground, still echoes in stone.