Directions: Meet at Brown’s Chapel

Hop in a horse-drawn wagon for a 40-minute horse-powered ride through the fall beauty of Newburyport’s historic Oak Hill Cemetery with noted author and historian Ghlee Woodworth, a 12th generation Newburyport native.

Prior to 1842, Oak Hill Cemetery was known as Old Maid’s Hall and consisted of about fifty burial sites in a small area. In January of 1842, Reverend Thomas B. Fox, pastor of the First Religious Society of Newburyport, and other leading citizens formed a board of trustees to oversee the design and management of a rural garden cemetery, which was to be one of the first in the United States. The new cemetery was consecrated in July 1842.

Oak Hill Cemetery is still an active cemetery, as well as the final resting place of shipwrecked sailors, sea captains and merchants, architects and photographers, writers and poets, silversmiths and newspaper editors, and adventurers who travelled to the Klondike gold rush.

$35 adults

$25 Museum of Old Newbury members