The oldest ground in the country, technically.

Built beside the meetinghouse

Duxbury incorporated in 1637, and within a year the young town raised its first meetinghouse on a rise above the harbor and opened a burying ground beside it. The second meetinghouse is believed to have stood on the adjoining lot, land the Duxbury Rural & Historical Society still owns today. Among Plymouth Colony's own burying grounds, this one ranks second, after Plymouth's own Cole's Hill: a fitting rank for the colony's second town.

Who's actually here

Roughly 130 marked graves survive across the ground's acre and a half, though the true number of burials is almost certainly higher. Seventeenth-century Duxbury buried nearly everyone here, and the earliest markers were plain fieldstones or wood, long since sunk or gone. The oldest carved stone still standing belongs to Capt. Jonathan Alden, who died in 1697: the youngest son of Mayflower passengers John and Priscilla Alden. That stone has its own small odyssey. In the early 1800s a descendant found it broken and carried it home, where it sat for thirty years before it resurfaced in 1880; it took another Alden descendant searching the grounds to match it back to its original base, where it stands today. The second-oldest stone, from 1700, belongs to Rev. Ichabod Wiswall, buried under carved sea monsters, a story told in full on Folklore.

Standish, John and Priscilla Alden, and fellow Mayflower passenger George Soule are all believed to rest here, though not all with equal certainty. John Alden's approximate spot wasn't marked until 1930, and Priscilla's exact plot has never been found. For everyone else without a surviving stone, an exact grave is impossible to name.

A century of quiet

Burials here trail off by about 1789. What follows is neglect, not memory. Fieldstones toppled, inscriptions wore past reading, and the ground gave way to overgrowth and grazing cattle over the graves of the town's founders, a quiet decline that runs alongside the same shipbuilding-bust years told on the History timeline.

Found, and fought over

In 1883, residents alarmed at the fading town founded the Duxbury Rural Society, today the Duxbury Rural & Historical Society, to improve and ornament what the bust had left behind. In 1887 they turned to this ground specifically, clearing brush and resetting stones. What happened next is documented in unusual detail: the search for Standish's actual grave, two exhumations, and the rival historical society the dig produced. That story is told in full in Duxbury after dark. It ends, for now, with a monument ringed by cannons the Navy gave the town in the mid-1950s.

Still the oldest, probably

The ground joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2015 and is maintained today by the Town of Duxbury. In 1976 the American Cemetery Association declared it the oldest maintained burying ground in the country, and the plaque announcing it went up the following year. It's a title worth exactly as much as the organization behind it: enough to bring visitors, and no more than that.

Sources & verification

Drawn from the Town of Duxbury's Old Burying Ground page, the Duxbury Rural & Historical Society's published history and photograph archive, the National Register of Historic Places listing (2015), and Historical Digression's account of the site's rediscovery. Spot an error? Tell us. Last verified: August 4, 2026.