Part 1: Visited Old Fields Burying Ground in South Berwick, Maine

Tom and I enjoy exploring old cemeteries because you never know what kind of history you'll find. One weekend last month, our friend Jeff (and our dogs and his dog) accompanied us when we explored the Old Fields Burying Ground in historic South Berwick, Maine.  Today's blog will take you there and give you some history Thanks to the Old Berwick Org website 

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ABOUT THE OLD FIELDS BURYING GROUND (also known as the Vine Street Cemetery), it was established in the 1600s.

(Photo: Rob and Jeff exploring) 

Overlooking Leigh's Mill Pond, Old Fields Burying Ground on Vine Street, South Berwick, Maine, is one of the oldest cemeteries in the United States, dating from the 1600s. 

It was the main burial place of the town's first European settlers -- families such as those of Thomas Spencer (c. 1596-1681) and Humphrey Chadbourne (1615-1667) and his father, William Chadbourne (1562-1682). The Chadbourne Family Association placed a marker recognizing William Chadbourne's arrival in 1634. 

(Photo: Tyler (L) and Dash (R) kept looking out of the windows of the truck to see when their dads were going to return from exploring) 

After the community's 1652 submission to Massachusetts Bay Colony, it was ordered that a meeting house be built, and around 1660 the settlers did so nearby, on the intersection of today's Brattle Street and Old South Road, at what was then the town center.

(Photo: The older part of the cemetery had some crypts above ground and were very weathered after hundreds of years. It made for a good Halloween-like setting.)

Hundreds of citizens are buried in Old Fields Burying Ground, many in graves no longer visible or where only fragments of headstones remain. The earliest markers may have been plain fieldstones.

Among some 339 identified surviving graves in the cemetery are an unknown number of former soldiers' graves from the 1700s to the 1900s. Of the identified veterans, seven are of the American Revolution, six of the Civil War, two of World War I, several others identified with the colonial militia, including two who fought at the Siege of Louisburg in 1745, and others who served as members of the Massachusetts and Maine Militias in the early United States.

WHO WAS Jonathan Hamilton?  (1745-1802) – South Berwick’s illustrious shipbuilder and merchant started as a trader in salt fish in the 1760s. Soon he owned forests in Lebanon, mill rights on the Great Works River and a shipyard and store at Pipe Stave Landing. 

During the 1780s and 1790s his properties were responsible for over half the ship tonnage on the Salmon Falls River  (Which is the BORDER between New Hampshire and Maine)  as well as masts, spars, planks, and shingles. His ships carried these cargoes and likely also some enslaved people. 

Customs records show 104 arrivals of Hamilton vessels in the port of Portsmouth, over half from the West Indies. His stores and warehouses at the Landing and in Portsmouth were stocked with tea, sugar, coffee, molasses, rum, timber and shipbuilding tools. 

In 1785, he started building the finest house in the area, later known as the Hamilton House owned by Historic New England.   (THAT HOUSE WILL BE THE TOPIC OF A FUTURE BLOG)