Old First Parish Burying Ground - Rockport, Massachusetts
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N 42° 39.519 W 070° 37.289
19T E 367104 N 4724184
Old First Parish Burying Ground - also known as Sandy Bay Cemetery - is on Beach Street in Rockport, Massachusetts, holds the remains of the town's earliest settlers and military members from the mid-18th-century to early 19th-century American wars.
Waymark Code: WM16JWW
Location: Massachusetts, United States
Date Posted: 08/17/2022
Views: 2
Overlooking Front Beach and Sandy Bay beyond, the hillside Old First Parish Burying Ground - also known as Sandy Bay Cemetery - is on Beach Street in Rockport, Massachusetts. It holds the remains of the town's earliest settlers and military members from the mid-18th-century to early 19th-century American wars. The
Find A Grave website lists 540 memorials from 1688 through 1987, and the great majority are pre-1900.
Looking southwest from the sidewalk, there is a monument honoring Revolutionary War soldiers at the nearly 300-year-old graveyard. Given by the Cape Ann Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, its cast bronze plaque mounted to a boulder reads:
PLACED BY CAPE ANN CHAPTER, D.A.R.
COMMEMORATING THE UNKNOWN GRAVES
OF REVOLUTIONARY SOLDIERS RESTING
IN THIS CEMETERY.
An informational historic marker stands next to the sidewalk at the bottom of the hill between the cemetery and Front Beach.
OLD FIRST PARISH
BURYING GROUND
ORIGINAL PLOT GIVEN BY THE
FIRST SETTLER, RICHARD TARR,
WHO WAS BURIED HERE IN 1782.
HERE LIE MOST OF THE EARLY
SETTLERS AND MANY OF THE
OFFICERS AND SOLDIERS OF THE
FRENCH AND INDIAN, REVOLUTION-
ARY AND 1812 WARS.
MASSACHUSETTS BAY COLONY
TERCENTENARY COMMISSION
From the next door City of Gloucester Cemeteries Advisory Committee I discovered William H. Dolliver, who, between 1895 and 1899, recorded tombstone inscriptions throughout Gloucester area cemeteries. His handwritten work was compiled in a bound book. Just over a century later, Gloucester residents Edith Sparling and Mary Ray led a project which transcribed, indexed, and scanned Dolliver's record of inscriptions and divided it among three volumes. The third, "Dolliver's Cemetery Inscriptions Volume III" includes First Parish Burying Ground, Rockport and Locust Grove/Folly Cove, Glouceseter. From 2019, this 200-page collection includes side-by-side, high quality scans of Dolliver's alphabetized listing pages paired with typed transcriptions of the historical document.