Nooks & Crannies: Grove St. Cemetery

[Daniel Lovins <daniel.lovins@YALE.EDU>]

Dear colleagues and friends,

M&PSA is pleased to announce the latest Nooks and Crannies
tour.  

Please join us for a tour of the Grove Street Cemetery on Wednesday,
May 15th, from 12:15-1:00.  
We are delighted that Judy Schiff, Yale's Chief Research Archivist, has
agreed to be our guide.  An unusual feature of Judy's tour will be
the identification of grave stones of two remarkable women: 

(1) Delia Bacon, who invented the theory that Shakespeare didn't write
"his own" plays (see
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/baym/essays/delia_bacon.htm) and 

(2) Mary Goodman, an African-American woman who, following the Civil War,
established the first scholarship for Black students to attend Yale. (see
http://www.yale.edu/opa/newsr/99-10-20-03.all.html)

Here's a brief description of the cemetery:

        

"Sometimes
referred to as the “Westminster of Yale,” the Grove Street Cemetery
maintains the graves of most early residents of New Haven, along with
those of Eli Whitney (Class of 1792), Noah Webster (Class of 1778),
Walter Camp (Class of 1880), Roger Sherman, fourteen Yale presidents, and
hundreds of other faculty members, alumni, and campus luminaries. One of
the oldest burial grounds in the City of New Haven, the cemetery was
designated as a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. Secretary of the
Interior in September. Located behind a brownstone wall and iron fence
running along Grove and Prospect streets, the cemetery joins those
select, historic structures and districts considered to “possess
exceptional value or quality in interpreting the heritage of the United
States. The cemetery was established in 1797 and was the first in the
country designed with family plots. Beside serving as the resting place
for many historically important figures and displaying tombstones ranging
back to the 1700s and a collection of specimen trees, the cemetery also
has an architecturally prominent, Egyptian Revival gateway entrance
facing High Street. The Grove Street Cemetery is one of only 60 National
Historic Landmarks in Connecticut and is the ninth such landmark in New
Haven." 
 --Yale Today, 2001
<http://www.yale.edu/development/yaletoday/vol4_no3/cemetery.html>

Here's a document that lists Revolutionary War Patriots who are buried at
the Grove St. Cemetery (some famous, some not):
http://www.ctssar.org/sites/grove_street.htm

This Nooks and Crannies Tour is open to all YUL staff.   
Send your message of interest with the subject line of “Grove St.
Cemetery” to me at
daniel.lovins@yale.edu.  
We will meet inside the Egyptian revival gates at the entrance to the
cemetery on Grove.  

I regret that, due to acoustics and space considerations, only the
first 15 respondents will be able to sign up.  

--Daniel Lovins
  for M&PSA

Daniel Lovins
Hebraica Catalog Librarian and Team Leader
Sterling Memorial Library
Yale University
PO Box 208240
New Haven, CT 06520
tel: 203/432-1707
fax: 203/432-7231