Perpetual Care? Forget it. And “Rest in Peace” might as well be “rest in pieces.” Waterbury’s Grand Street Cemetery is just a ghost of a graveyard, at least if you define “ghost” as something invisible that nevertheless has a presence. Located in the heart of the city, the public Silas Bronson Library and adjacent Library Park with its walkways, benches and bandshell sit atop a cemetery unseen.
This subterranean secret remained unknown to me for years even though I’d been to the library for poetry readings and had walked through the park on occasion. But driving along Meadow Street one day on my way to the railroad station, I saw embedded in a brick wall a series of rectangular masonry tablets that looked like gravestones. I stopped the car and got out. From the sidewalk, I could see they were indeed headstones from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There were about two-dozen of them, most in weather-darkened marble, others in brownstone. A few were carved with soul effigies, those winged faces of the puritan past. Even with the sun behind me, they were faded and hard to read.
Could this be a narrow cemetery squeezed between the road and a retaining wall behind which was Library Park? Then I noticed a large horizontal tablet centered above the tombstones that read: “These stones from the first cemetery in Waterbury now the site of Library Park were placed here at the suggestion of various patriotic organizations.” It was dated 1934. Apparently, “these stones” that were once grave markers had been transformed into cenotaphs, memorials without a buried body.
Tombstones facing a public street and lacking the remains to which they belonged seemed a bit creepy, if not disrespectful. Reservoirs, parks, highways and other civic improvements sometimes disturb burials, but usually the bodies are reburied in consecrated ground with the stones that belong to them. Without context or explanation, these appeared merely decorative, an exercise in design. And if that wasn’t odd enough, it seemed ironic that the most common family name on the stones was Bronson, the same name memorialized by the library. My curiosity ignited.
On returning home, I hurried to my keyboard for a little digital research. I knew the Grand Street Cemetery, established in the late seventeenth century, had been the only burial ground in Waterbury (originally called Mattatuck) for about its first fifty years. But by computer search, I learned that the four acres had eventually been divided into sections for Congregationalists, Episcopalians, Catholics, and people of color. When Riverside Cemetery opened in 1853 on the west side of the Naugatuck River, Grand Street fell out of favor. Riverside was designed in the fashionable and well landscaped “rural” style, so some wealthy families moved their ancestors’ remains there.
Grand Street Cemetery went into steep decline and soon became derelict. “Re-opened graves, with fragments of coffins left uncovered in them, and overturned headstones and footstones became features of the place, and before many years had passed, the ground was overgrown with weeds, briers and bushes, save that a few careful hands kept in order the graves of their friends and relatives,” wrote Katharine A. Prichard, in a volume published by The Mattatuck Historical Society in 1917. In a controversial move, the city took possession of the site, and in the early 1890s began converting it into a park with a library in its midst. Despite plans otherwise, only a small portion of the estimated 800 bodies buried beneath inscribed stones were removed. An additional 1,800 unmarked graves stayed in place. The land was regraded and headstones were buried, although not necessarily above the body to which they belonged, according to Prichard. At this time, the retaining wall along Meadow Street was built, although the headstones were not placed there until 1934.
Soon after the park was established, the library was built. As the cellar was excavated, Prichard notes “that many stones which the city had buried were taken out of the ground in a fair state of preservation, but no one appeared to care for them, and the oldest and most valuable, lying scattered on the surface of the ground, were crushed under cart wheels.” Those that survived intact were placed in the basement of the library where they remained for decades until being added to the retaining wall. Exhumed remains were reburied not far from the library’s footprint.
Over the years, Library Park has featured concerts and festivals, even a snow sculpture competition. When I’ve visited, children have been at play; teens listened to music; and people of all ages sat on benches chatting, reading, or feeding flocks of pigeons. I doubt that more than a very few know they are in a cemetery. But, regardless of its current use and what lies on the surface, there are still bodies resting below that continue to define part of the land’s purpose.
Hearing that Library Park was under renovation, I stopped by in fall 2020 and peaked through the construction fence. The ground was torn up and there were piles of building materials scattered about. I was relieved, as I expected I would be, to see no bones or tombstone fragments. The interments run deep. I went to the front of the library, which was closed, and walked toward the modernist, rectangular structure featuring large plates of tinted glass. I paused near a statue of Benjamin Franklin. Here, I’d learned, was the area where people of color were buried in unmarked graves. I bowed my head and silently uttered a prayer before returning to my car.
There’s a secret literally buried beneath Waterbury’s Library Park, and if the library itself lacks skeletons in its closets, it more than makes up for this with those by which it’s surrounded. Such knowledge won’t prevent me from future visits to the library’s stacks or from sitting in the park. I’ve always found my time in both too well spent. But I will do so with a new found sense of place and presence that gives depth to being there. Hallowed ground it remains.
It’s a truism that the present is built on the past. Maybe sometimes it’s too true for complete comfort.
