Videos

Wed, 12/17/2025

This documentary explores New Haven’s Grove Street Cemetery, a National Historic Landmark founded in 1797. The film takes a look at the cemetery’s historical significance, the people interred there, funerary art, landscape plantings, and the extensive community involvement with the site. Commissioned by the Friends of the Grove Street Cemetery, it was produced, directed, and edited by the Emmy Award-winning New Haven filmmaker Karyl K. Evans. (30 minutes)

Wed, 12/17/2025

A talk by Dr Ian Dungavell, Chief Executive of the Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust, in conjunction with the quasquibicentennial of the Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven.

English garden cemeteries have a lot in common with those of the nineteenth-century rural cemetery movement in America. The story of beautifully laid-out grounds ornamented with trees, shrubs and flowers providing a garden of rest distinct from the overcrowded and unsanitary urban graveyard can be told equally of both countries. But, delving a little deeper into the first two decades of cemetery establishment in England, and taking in Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Norwich and London, this lecture will show that the tranquil sepulchral garden was not as quiet as it seemed. Nor is it quiet now: how can we make them sustainable for today?

This online talk took place on November 6, 2022.

Wed, 12/17/2025

An exploration of some of the painters, sculptors, architects and others memorialized in the Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, this illustrated talk will present biographic notes, design of monuments, and the cultural, historical context of National Landmark Grove Street Cemetery.

This online talk took place on November 12, 2023.

Wed, 12/17/2025

An online talk by geologist Daniel Coburn of Southern Connecticut State University, about the cemetery’s collection of gravestones and family monuments, as well as some of the notable figures in the history of earth science who are buried there.

This online talk took place on November 10, 2024.

Wed, 12/17/2025

Peter Dobkin Hall (1946-2015) spoke on the Thomas Phillips and Son Company, the most prominent stone carving firm in New Haven in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Hall held appointments at Wesleyan University (1974-1982), Yale University (1973-1999), and Harvard University (2000-2015).

James A. Slater (1920-2008) was the commentator on Hall’s paper. Slater, an authority on colonial gravestones, taught at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, for several decades where he was head of the zoology and entomology departments.

Wed, 12/17/2025

William Clendaniel, then president and chief executive officer of Mount Auburn Cemetery, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, spoke on the history of that cemetery. It is one of the most prominent Victorian rural cemeteries in the country and a leader in visitor outreach, programming, and preservation of archival records.

Wed, 12/17/2025

Judith A. Schiff (1937-2022) spoke on women’s history as recorded in Grove Street Cemetery. Shiff was the chief research archivist at Yale University Library, and was a library staff member for more than fifty years. She was also a member of the cemetery’s Standing Committee of Proprietors and a founder of the Friends of the Grove Street Cemetery.

Barbara Oberg (1942-2024) was the commentator on Schiff’s paper. A historian of early America and a scholar, she was editor of the Papers of Benjamin Franklin at Yale University (1986-1999) and editor of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson at Princeton University (1999-2014).