Mansfield Center Cemetery is a small

cemetery A cemetery, burial ground, gravesite or graveyard is a place where the remains of dead people are buried or otherwise interred. The word ''cemetery'' (from Greek , "sleeping place") implies that the land is specifically designated as a buri ...

in the Mansfield Center section of

Mansfield, Connecticut Mansfield is a town in Tolland County, Connecticut, United States. The population was 25,892 at the 2020 census. Pequot and Mohegan people lived in this region for centuries before the arrival of English settler-immigrants in the late 17th cent ...

. Established in 1693, it is one of the few surviving elements of Mansfield's early colonial settlement history. It also has a distinguished array of funerary markers carved by acknowledged master's across eastern Connecticut. It was listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic v ...

in 1992. and

Description and history

Mansfield Center Cemetery is located south of the modern center of Mansfield, at the southeast corner of Storrs and Cemetery Roads. It is a roughly rectangular area in size, ringed by a fieldstone wall. A line of trees separates the cemetery from Storrs Road, and there is a gate with stone posts providing entrance to the ground. The cemetery grounds are densely filled with burial sites, with the burials uniformly oriented with the head to the east, and headstones with the carved face to the west. Only a few more elaborate monuments (typically of mid to late 19th century origin) dot the grounds. The oldest dated marker is for Exercise Conant, who died in 1722. Mansfield was settled as part of Windham in 1690 and was separately incorporated in 1704. The site was set aside for use as a cemetery as early as 1693 and it remained in general use for that purpose until the 1870s. The cemetery's 18th-century gravestones, decorated with

cherubim A cherub (; plural cherubim; he, כְּרוּב ''kərūḇ'', pl. ''kərūḇīm'', likely borrowed from a derived form of akk, 𒅗𒊏𒁍 ''karabu'' "to bless" such as ''karibu'', "one who blesses", a name for the lamassu) is one of the u ...

, geometric designs, and a variety of funerary symbols, are considered to be illustrative of the rich artistic tradition of funerary

stone carving Stone carving is an activity where pieces of rough natural stone are shaped by the controlled removal of stone. Owing to the permanence of the material, stone work has survived which was created during our prehistory or past time. Work carried ...

in colonial

New England New England is a region comprising six states in the Northeastern United States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It is bordered by the state of New York to the west and by the Canadian provinces ...

. More than 180 stones have been attributed to identifiable stone carvers, including several 18th-century masters of the craft.

References

{{National Register of Historic Places Protected areas of Tolland County, Connecticut 1693 establishments in Connecticut Cemeteries on the National Register of Historic Places in Connecticut Mansfield, Connecticut National Register of Historic Places in Tolland County, Connecticut

Description and history

See also

References