The Grove Street Cemetery is one of the oldest burial grounds in the City of New Haven. It was established in 1797; the cemetery was the first in the country designed with family plots. Within it are the graves or grave markers of most early residents of New Haven, including those of Eli Whitney (Class of 1792), Noah Webster (Class of 1778), Walter Camp (Class of 1880), Roger Sherman, fourteen Yale presidents, and hundreds of other faculty members, alumni, and campus luminaries.
Located behind a brownstone wall and iron fence running along Grove and Prospect streets, the cemetery serves as the resting place for many historically important figures and a number of its tombstones date back to the 1600s. In addition to a collection of specimen trees, the cemetery also has an architecturally prominent Egyptian Revival gateway entrance facing High Street.
The Grove Street Cemetery is one of only 64 National Historic Landmarks in Connecticut and is one of eight such landmarks in New Haven.
