The Pelham Hill Cemetery is not just a regular cemetery, but it has a very big and important history. The burying ground was laid out in 1739, when Scotts Irish came to dwell in the town.  In 1744 people felt that the graveyard should have a wall so they voted it to be built.   The stone wall was built in 1830 by Nathanial Wheeler.  Due to route 202 being built the whole Eastern wall and graves had to be moved to the western part.

        A crucial part of a graveyard is the graves, here is a little about them.  No one knows how many graves are in the cemetery, because some uncut field stones (graves)  fell down, which lost the location of the buried person.  Actually, a majority of the graves found in the cemetery are uncut fieldstones. In fact, only 10 % of the graves in the cemetery had inscriptions on them.

        One monument is in honor of Rev. Robert Abercrombie, the Town Hall’s first minister. The minister was buried in the Pelham Hill Cemetery, but over time the location became lost. Today, people think that Abercrombie was buried, and later the location of his grave got buried under the Town Hall.  This was because the Town Hall was moved backwards from the road and onto the cemetery grounds in the 1840s.

                   Though many Pelham residents were buried in the Town Hall Cemetery, none of the Pelham soldiers that served in the Revolutionary War or Shays Rebellion are buried there. Some important people are buried here who owned the land like Alexander Conkey and George Cowan.

        There are also many graves near each other where families are buried. (You can tell by the last name inscribed on the grave.) These are called family clusters. Often the families had died in the same month because there might have been a disease that killed everyone in a short period of time.

        One girl died when she was only six, which was probably because she had a sickness or disease that had no cure, and that grave is one of the earliest. The latest grave in the cemetery is probably  Mary McCollister Mellen. Today, people are not getting buried in the cemetery anymore, but  the Pelham hill cemetery is still a great place of history. In it dwell the essence of people who lived two hundred years ago, and those field stones are much more than big rocks.  I hope that you learned to respect grave stones and that you enjoyed this report!

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