A colonial burying ground, Salem

A Mayflower child, a governor and a witch judge lie here

The Charter Street Historic District is a small pocket of old Salem, three properties that survived while the city grew up around them: the Pickman House, the Grimshawe House, and the Charter Street Cemetery. People have buried their dead on this ground since at least 1637, making it one of the oldest cemeteries in the country.

Three graves here carry real weight. Richard More, a child passenger on the Mayflower, is buried here. His grave is the only documented burial site of anyone who sailed on that ship. Simon Bradstreet is buried here too, the last governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and husband of the poet Anne Bradstreet. Bradstreet died in 1697, having outlived nearly every man who started that colony with him.

The third grave belongs to John Hathorne, a Salem magistrate who died in 1717. Hathorne sat as a judge during the Salem witch trials of 1692. He sent people to their deaths and never apologized for it. His great-great-grandson, the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, added a "w" to the family name, partly to distance himself from what Hathorne had done.

The condemned were not buried here. The 19 people hanged in 1692 were left in shallow graves at Proctor's Ledge, about a mile from this spot, and some families crept out at night to recover the bodies for private burial. The cemetery beside you holds the judges and the governors. It does not hold their victims.

The Pickman House hid its old timbers under a Victorian roof

The Pickman House sits just east of the cemetery gate. Samuel Pickman, a mariner, bought the land in 1657. Historians credit him with building the house sometime after. No one agrees on the exact year. One study puts it at 1671, the Peabody Essex Museum says 1665, and a 1979 state survey argues for 1680. What is certain is that Pickman's estate papers describe a house standing there by 1687. The home stayed in use for centuries, hidden under a Victorian-era roof that concealed its 17th-century bones until workers rediscovered them in 1968.

Hawthorne courted Sophia Peabody at the Grimshawe House

West of the cemetery gate stands the Grimshawe House, built around 1770 in the plain, boxy Federal style. It belonged to the family of Sophia Peabody, and it was here that the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne courted her before their marriage. Hawthorne used the house and the graveyard beside it in his fiction, most notably in an unfinished novel called "Doctor Grimshawe's Secret." Hawthorne added a "w" to his own name to put some distance between himself and his great-great-grandfather's record on the witch trials bench.

A gravestone was said to be cast from a dead man's bullets

The cemetery holds other names worth knowing. Increase Mather and Cotton Mather, the two Puritan ministers whose writings shaped how colonial New England understood the witch trials and much else, are buried nearby in the Mather tomb near the Charter Street entrance. A section of the burying ground served as a potter's field for freed Black residents, among them Prince Hall, who founded the country's first Black Masonic lodge. Local tradition holds that one man buried here, Daniel Malcolm, was shot in a confrontation with British soldiers before independence, and that the lead shot pulled from his body was melted down and poured into his own gravestone. Visitors still ask after that stone.

A triple-decker house has stood beside the dead since 1820

Just along the street, at Charter Street, a triple-decker house went up in 1820, three stories built to hold three separate households. It has stood through two full centuries of Salem's changes, from sea captains' money to the immigrant boarding houses that filled this neighborhood by the 1890s. County records today list its owners as Mary F. Richards, trustee, and the H. Berkley Peabody 2008 Revocable Trust. The house is a private home, not part of the cemetery or its museums, but it shares the same short stretch of ground, built by people who lived beside the dead rather than among the famous names resting there.

The district joined the National Register and welcomes walkers

The National Register of Historic Places listed the whole district, the two houses and the cemetery together, in 1975. Today the Pickman House serves as a welcome center for visitors to the burying ground. The Grimshawe House remains privately held. The cemetery itself stays open to walkers. Its leaning 17th- and 18th-century stones are still legible if you take the time to read them, the graves of a Mayflower passenger, a colonial governor, and a witch trial judge all within a few steps of each other.