Common Street Cemetery
cemetery in Watertown, Massachusetts
The Common Street Cemetery is the second-oldest documented cemetery in Watertown, Massachusetts. Located at the junction of Common and Mount Auburn Streets in central Watertown, it was founded in 1754. It is the site of Watertown's second meeting house, where major planning and resistance activities took place in the early days of the American Revolutionary War. The cemetery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2022.
Description and history
Watertown's Common Street Cemetery occupies 2.8 acres (1.1 ha) of relatively flat terrain at the northwest corner of Common and Mount Auburn Streets, just northeast of Watertown Square. It is a roughly triangular parcel, its rear property lines abutting the Watertown High School and a residential area. A paved road provides circulation access within the cemetery, in which graves are lined up in neat rows separated by grass. There are estimated to be more than 500 burials.
When Watertown was founded by English colonists in 1630, its first town center was located near Gerry's Landing on the Charles River. This town center included a small burying ground, which does not appear to have survived.
The public source identifies “Common Street Cemetery” as cemetery in Watertown, Massachusetts. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Common, Street and Cemetery.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q111169415. Authority coordinates are 42.368, -71.178. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1754, 2022 and 1630.
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This entry incorporates text from “Common Street Cemetery” 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.