Bradford Burial Ground
historic cemetery in Massachusetts, United States
The Bradford Burial Ground is a historic cemetery at 326 Salem Street in the Bradford section of Haverhill, Massachusetts. The 1.5-acre (0.61 ha) cemetery was established in 1665, on land given by John Heseltine to the town of Bradford. The oldest readable marker in the cemetery has a date of 1689, but there are likely to be older burials. The cemetery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2015.
Description and history
The Bradford Burial Ground is located to the southeast of the center of Bradford village, on the north side of Salem Street, a through road connecting Bradford to Georgetown. It is directly opposite Orchard Hill Road, and adjacent to the drive to the Bradford Swim Club. The land it occupies is roughly pentagonal in shape, and is fronted by a finished stone retaining wall, with a small flight if granite steps for access. The remaining sides of the cemetery are demarcated by fieldstone walls. The terrain is generally level but sloping gently downhill to the north, and is basically grass dotted with mature trees.
Most of the graves are arranged in a generally east-facing orientation, but this is not always exact, and there is one row of graves that faces north.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bradford Burial Ground” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.