10/05/2026
Over the last few days, I had the privilege of driving through New England, visiting beautiful towns surrounded by incredible fall foliage. It was wonderful!
Anyone who loves history knows that New England is extraordinary. Everywhere you look, there are reminders of the earliest chapters of European settlement in what became the United States.
But one stop I made in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was so fascinating that I decided I needed to share it with you.
Portsmouth was settled in the 1600s, and parts of the old city still feel remarkably colonial. Eighteenth-century houses stand only a sidewalk’s width from narrow streets, their tall, flat facades creating streetscapes so dramatic that they almost look like movie sets. You half expect someone dressed in 1700s clothing to walk out the front door.
Except this isn’t a movie set. It’s the real thing.
One of the highlights of my trip was wandering through an old Portsmouth burial ground containing graves dating to the 1600s.
It is not a perfectly level, modern cemetery. Ancient stones lean at odd angles. Some are cracked or broken. Some inscriptions have nearly disappeared after centuries of exposure. Others remain remarkably crisp. A stone wall separates the burial ground from the surrounding city.
Nearby is the water—the reason Portsmouth existed here in the first place. Standing there, it wasn’t difficult to imagine the masts of wooden sailing vessels filling the harbor centuries ago.
And then I started looking closely at the gravestones.
They were covered with skulls.
Skulls with crossbones. Skulls with wings. Strange faces. Hourglasses. Elaborate scrolls and flowers.
My first thought was: Who wants a skull and crossbones on their mother’s grave? Seriously??
So there I stood among the graves of people who lived centuries before electricity, automobiles or telephones, pulling out my phone and asking my 21st-century artificial-intelligence companion what these strange carvings meant. I suspect I thoroughly confused any colonial spirits who happened to be watching.
One of the first stones I examined read:
HERE
LYETH BURIED
Ye BODY OF
JOHN JACKSON
AGED 33 YEARS
DYED JANUARY
26 1691
More than three centuries old.
Around the inscription were deeply carved scrolls and figures. And as I moved from stone to stone, I began to understand that these carvings weren’t simply decoration.
They were telling me what these people believed about death.
The skull and crossbones weren’t pirate symbols. They were reminders of mortality—a form of memento mori: remember that you, too, must die.
On other stones, the skull had grown wings. The image could suggest the separation of the soul from the mortal body. Hourglasses reminded the living that time was passing.
And gradually, the imagery changed.
The earliest stones tended toward stark images of mortality: skulls, bones and death’s heads.
Then came elaborate winged skulls.
Eventually the imagery became less frightening and more comforting and sentimental—winged faces, floral decoration and other symbols associated with remembrance and immortality.
And standing there, something suddenly occurred to me.
I wasn’t simply looking at tombstones. I was watching a culture change.
Within this little patch of ground, one generation’s understanding of death and eternity was replaced by another’s. The stones reflected changing religious ideas, changing artistic tastes and changing ways of remembering the dead.
It was almost as though someone had laid the turning pages of early American history side by side in the grass.
One stone especially fascinated me. It had broken diagonally across the carved upper portion and had later been repaired. The carving above the break appeared noticeably sharper than the carving below it. I wondered whether the broken piece might once have lain face-down—or perhaps even been buried—for years before being recovered and reattached. I couldn’t prove it, of course, but suddenly even the damage to a gravestone had become part of its story.
That may have been my favorite lesson of all.
An old cemetery doesn’t have to look new to be cared for.
Stones lean. They weather. They break. Lichen grows. Inscriptions fade. Yet preserving those original stones—and the evidence of their age—allows us to stand in the same place and read something left behind by people who died hundreds of years ago.
As I walked through the burial ground, I photographed the stones as they laid in the cemetery. I’m going to share some of those photographs below and add comments about the symbols when I can.
As you look through them, see if you can see what I began to see:
Can you watch the beliefs and culture of generations change through the stones they left behind?
For me, this little cemetery became something much larger than a collection of old graves.
It became a history book written in stone.
