After going to the Grove Street Cemetery and doing their cradle grave and Civil War tour we had to return to check out all their Amistad related graves and find the monument they left for Glen Miller which we missed the first time. There’s even a tree tour but we didn’t get to that one.

Right at the front where the kiosk is there is also a monument to the captives of the Amistad, many of whom were buried in this cemetery near the lawyers, judges, and other people involved in this historic trial. Most of these individuals were nearby. It was interesting to see what happened to many of these individuals after the trials, it seems a number of the captives became active and successful members of the community which just astounds me considering the trauma they must have all carried with them.

We learned the oldest stones that were leaned against the perimeter of the cemetery were actually from a different cemetery that used to be where the park is now. Though they may have moved the stones they don’t appear to have removed the bodies and as late as 2020 human remains were found entangled in the roots of a downed tree. This is not a unique story as many cemeteries were eventually taken over and transformed into parks over the years.

We were also surprised to find Webster of dictionary fame, Goodyear the guy that pioneered vulcanized rubber, Josiah Willard Gibbs – inventor of calculus and significant contributor to thermodynamics, Eli Whitney inventor of the cotton gin, Walter Camp “father of American Football,” and Othniel Charles Marsh a tireless Yale professor and paleontologist that worked mostly on the evolution of birds publishing an astounding 1,400 scientific papers in his life.

And of course towards the very end of our exploration of this cemetery we found the monument to Glenn Miller – composer of In the Mood and a ton of other songs that are still played today. I say monument because this isn’t his actual grave – he died in a plane crash fighting in World War II and his body was never recovered. I wonder if he was the first of the popular musicians to die in a plane crash, either way what a bad ass way to go – killing Nazis.

Anyway, that was our tour. We learned a lot of history and saw a lot of cool things. This is definitely a cemetery worth checking out and if you’re looking for someone specific the fact the roads have names and the stones have addresses makes it pretty easy to find them.