Location Malden, Massachusetts Area 1 ha Phone +1 781-397-7191 | NRHP Reference # 81000108 Year built 1649 Added to NRHP 27 August 1981 | |
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Architect Joseph Lamson; James Foster Address Green St, Malden, MA 02148, USA Similar Bell Rock Memorial Park, Converse Memorial Library, Old Cemetery, Fellsmere Park Parkways, Pine Banks | ||
Common Burying Ground at Sandy Bank (also known as Bell Rock Cemetery) is a historic cemetery in Malden, Massachusetts. It occupies a roughly rectangular parcel of land 3.3 acres (1.3 ha) in size, bounded by Medford and Green Streets, Converse Avenue, and the Malden River on the west. It is the oldest cemetery in the city, established in 1649. Its earliest probable burial dates to that same year, although the oldest gravestone, that of Alice Brackenbury, bears the date 1670. The Malden Public Library, in its local history collection, has a multi-volume set of binders that contain alphabetically ordered photographs of every grave in Bell Rock Cemetery with the epitaphs on each gravestone transcribed below its picture. The cemetery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1981.
The cemetery serves as the final resting place for Michael Wigglesworth, a Puritan minister, doctor and poet whose poem, "The Day of Doom" was a very popular in early New England and remains so to this day.