Even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death. Kurt Vonnegut
I spent this afternoon wandering around the Old Burying Ground near Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, looking at the weathered headstones and thinking about those who have died in American wars. Opened in 1634, it is one of America’s oldest cemeteries. As the only cemetery in Cambridge for nearly two hundred years, it took in a cross-section of the population, from the destitute to the powerful. It also took in its share of soldiers.
There are nineteen graves of Revolutionary soldiers, including two African-American slaves who served and died. The headstone above is for Joseph Taylor, who was wounded at the Battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775 and lingered for two months at a makeshift army hospital before dying. He was from Peterborough, New Hampshire. He was eighteen years old.
The remains of six other Revolutionary soldiers from Cambridge were relocated here in 1870 after being rescued from a common grave by the Harvard professor Eben Horsford. There is at least one soldier from the War of 1812, but in the early nineteenth century the City of Cambridge opened a new cemetery in Cambridgeport, and regular burials ceased.
But the wars did not. Within sight of the Old Burying Ground is Harvard’s Sanders Theater, built as a memorial for the Civil War dead, and up Garden Street is a statue commemorating veterans of the Spanish-American War:
And lest we forget that violence is visited only on those who go to war, a block away the First Church in Cambridge – founded in 1633, even earlier than the Old Burying Ground – has a moving tribute to 2014’s victims of gun violence in the Boston area:
Reach the Shining River 