The Cemetery on King Street

On King Street in Hertford, behind the high school, is the cemetery. This is a very old cemetery. It has a pump station in the center, which I suspect is being used to help keep the swampy ground dry and prevent the stones from falling, and the graves from sinking.

It’s not a huge, ostentatious place, but it is full of a sense of history. You’ll see from the included photo that the White Family (the same White family, I believe, who built our house, though what branch of it I have no idea) has been burying their dead in this same graveyard, side by side, for literally centuries.



Another family planted a small dogwood in a stone rectangle plot many years ago. That Dogwood is very large now, flowering brilliantly, and its roots bind the graves of the family almost certainly, having grown outward from the center of that plot to embrace them all. It is beautiful.

The Cemetery in Hertford isn’t laid out in any geometric pattern you can discern, and the markers and monuments are as varied, no doubt, as those whose memories are contained within them. Families are buried there, not individuals. Not just Dogwoods put down roots, it seems.

On our way out of the cemetery, we happened upon one of the Hertford Turtles – a very small one. I knew the weather would turn bad last night, so we brought him home, and he now resides in a turtle bowl in our kitchen. Life, from a place dedicated to the remembrance of other lives….

His name is Tom.

DNW