Central Cemetery

In the center of Sherborn, tucked behind an old fieldstone wall, is one of the town’s earliest burial grounds. The simple sign identifies Central Cemetery with the date 1686, immediately connecting this quiet patch of land with the earliest generations of Sherborn.

Sherborn itself had been incorporated only in 1674. During the years that followed King Philip’s War, the small community began establishing the institutions necessary for an organized New England town:  a local government, a meetinghouse, a minister, and a place to bury its dead. Central Cemetery developed on land that had originally been part of the First Parish church common.

The oldest surviving inscription here belongs to Grace Bullen, who died in 1686. Her gravestone contains the unusual words, “The first grain sown in this granary,” suggesting that she was regarded as the first person buried in this ground. The cemetery therefore preserves a physical connection to Sherborn only twelve years after the town’s incorporation

Today there are only about fifty stones remaining, many of them weathered or broken. But together they provide an extraordinary record of changing New England gravestone art. Among them are seventeenth-century winged skulls, eighteenth-century winged faces, and the willow-and-urn designs that became popular during the nineteenth century. Some retain delicately carved borders of intertwined leaves and flowers

Central Cemetery is not actually Sherborn’s oldest cemetery—the Old South Burial Ground and Farm Cemetery predate it, but it is one of the town’s three surviving seventeenth-century burial grounds. It is also now included among Sherborn’s historic properties listed on the National Register of Historic Places. 

From the road, Central Cemetery is simply a small collection of old stones behind a fieldstone wall. But those stones take us back to the first generation of people building a community here more than three centuries ago.