This text was adapted from our Instagram post on 10/14/2020.
Did you know that Sennott Park (Broadway and Norfolk Street) is located on the site of the former Cambridgeport Burial Ground? This has also been referred to as the Broadway Cemetery and Ward II Burial Ground.
The burial ground was active from 1811/1812 to about 1865. At the time of the its establishment, Cambridgeport was being settled as a district of the city, with the hope of eventually incorporating as a separate city (!). With this in mind, Cambridgeport citizens laid out a town center between Norfolk and Columbia streets, with the burial ground adjacent.
In 1846, the superintendent of the grounds, Daniel Stone, reported that since its opening there had been an estimated 2500-2600 burials and 30 tombs that were taken up by two or more families. The burial ground was discontinued after 1865, and the graves were excavated and the remains transferred to the present Cambridge Cemetery or to another cemetery selected by the family of the deceased.
By the 1870s, the area had been landscaped as a public square and renamed Broadway Park. It was re-landscaped in 1894 by the Olmsted firm, and renamed Edward J. Sennott Park in 1939 after a late City Councillor.
The park was redesigned in 1969 as part of the Model Cities program and again in the early 1970s. It remains a highly active public park, and the City has plans to make repairs and modest improvements to the park beginning in spring 2021 (according to their last website update).
The Cambridge Historical Commission has two original plot maps of the burial ground from the Engineering Department, shown below.
The image above is a plot plan for the “Strangers’ Lot,” so-called because this large lot in the northwest corner of the grounds was “reserved for the burial of paupers and strangers” (Lucius Paige, History of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1630-1877). Superintendent Stone reported that the lot had been buried over “and commenced the second time” by 1846. Stone also wrote that during a Strangers’ Lot burial in 1826, diggers came upon “an ancient Indian fireplace… . That part of town being, according to appearance, formerly a great place for Indian resort.”
The second image, above, is dated 1902 and depicts the then-remaining plots in the “Central Passage” of the burial ground.
You will see names crossed off in both of these plot maps. We speculate that this was done as remains were transferred to other cemeteries in the years after 1865; the same may have happened after the second redesign in 1894.
It seems that not enough care was taken during the initial process of transferring remains–over the years headstones have been found in house foundations around the neighborhood, and in 1970 fragmentary human remains were discovered at the site of a playground under construction on the park.
For information on other cemeteries in Cambridge, including research on the Old Burying Ground in Harvard Square, check out an earlier post here.
