Death in New Haven

New Haven Green, once the nerve center of 17th-century Puritan life, was designed to squeeze 144,000 people inside approximately 16 acres. The chosen scrum was meant to enjoy the privilege of surviving the Second Coming and the reshuffle of expendable human life. With the big day still ahead of them, and ahead of us still, the New England settlers kept themselves busy.

Upon the Green, they established a market, a prison, religious meeting houses, and enough acres to bury the dead. The present-day proprietors of this private land are at least partly descended from the original colonial landowners. On our short impromptu tour of the brick-floored Crypt, the caretaker casually pointed out Yale University's cofounder (James Pierpont, ancestor of Aaron Burr, J.P. Morgan, and "Jingle Bells" songwriter James Lord Pierpont) and Benedict Arnold's first wife (Margaret Mansfield), while marching us, drill-like, in and around rows of brown sandstone grave markers, popular in the 17th and 18th centuries and carved with winged soul effigies.

Beyond the church and beneath the Green lie the remains of a reported 5,000, although rough online estimates vary from 1,000 to 10,000. Walking across the park over their unmarked graves, they seem like a much tighter community compared with the city's social hubs experienced thus far. In 1797, epidemics and aspirations prompted a new area to bury the dead, the New Haven Burying Ground. Now called Grove Street Cemetery, the nonsectarian and private graveyard was the first of its kind. It takes a village, or in this case a cemetery of pioneers; among them, countless Yale presidents and professors, state governors, revolutionary heroes, activists, and inventors (of items such as the cotton gin and vulcanized rubber) to support the foundations of Yale's incalculable dominance.

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