Seasonal Guided Tours of the Old Burying Ground
Step into Deerfield’s past on a guided walking tour beginning at the Historic Deerfield Visitor Center at Hall Tavern and continuing to the Old Burying Ground on Albany Road. Established in the 1690s, this historic cemetery holds the stories of community members whose lives were shaped by conflict and survival. Alongside prominent settlers and town leaders, the burying ground also contains unmarked graves of poorer residents, Black individuals, and Native Americans, lives remembered differently or not at all in stone. This tour invites reflection on whose stories endure, whose remain hidden, and how cemeteries both reveal and obscure questions of social inclusion and memory. – One hour tours depart from the Historic Deerfield Visitor Center at Hall Tavern at 1pm and 3pm. Consider wearing comfortable shoes for walking.
How might the way this event is memorialized differ from how the Native allies of the French might have remembered it?
Which gravestones are large, decorated, or carefully inscribed? Which are simple or missing? What does this say about social status in early Deerfield?
How can remembering both the marked and unmarked help us build a fuller, more honest story of the past?
