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Old Burying Ground is located in Jaffrey Center, Cheshire County, New Hampshire. Also termed as Jaffrey's Old Burying Ground, the oldest standing stones date from the early 1770s. The cemetery is still active and is well maintained.
Behind Original Meeting House
Jaffrey Center, New Hampshire, USA
Coordinates: 42.82875, -72.05732
https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/641063/old-burying-ground
https://news.findagrave.com/2023/02/03/fortunes-remembered-in-jaffr...
"Jaffrey oldest cemetery is located just behind the Meetinghouse a short distance north of Route 124 in Jaffrey Center. The original grant of the township—at first called Middle Monadnock No. 2—was made in 1749 and among the stipulations was “that a good Convenient Meeting House be Built . . . as near the Center of the Town . . . and Ten Acres of Land reserved for Publick Uses.”
The Burying Ground qualified as such a use and so too the Common for military training and reviews. Later, a petition to the Township proprietors noted that before incorporation in 1773 a burying place had been reserved on the Common “ . . . and some persons interred there.”
The Town History mentions Captain John Groat who died in 1771. He is said to have been the first permanent settler in what is now Jaffrey, having arrived in 1758. According to local legend he was laid to rest on the spot over which the Meetinghouse was raised four years later.
The present form of the Burying Ground reflects the work of a committee appointed by the Town in 1784. Of the four members, three—Roger Gilmore (A), Daniel Emery (B) and Adonijah Howe (C)—are buried within. No trace remains of the earliest gravesites, but at least eight marked graves pre-date the laying out of 1784, the oldest being that of Mrs. Jaen Harper (D) who died in 1777."
http://www.jaffreyhistory.org/02places_built/05cemeteries/oldburyin...
Famous Memorial
Willa Cather
Author. Born in Virginia, she moved with her family to Webster County, Nebraska at the age of nine. There she lived among the immigrant families that became the inspiration for the frontier settlers in her writings. She graduated from Red Cloud High School in 1890, and then enrolled in the University of Nebraska. While attending the university, she worked as a drama critic for The Lincoln Journal. She received her degree in 1895, and at that time moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and worked for Home Monthly and The Daily Leader and later taught English and Latin in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. Her first book was a poetry collection, "April Twilights" (1903), followed by a short story collection, "The Troll Garden" (1905). She then moved to New York to work for McClure's magazine from 1906 to 1912, where she became managing editor. Encouraged by colleagues, she turned to writing full time. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1923 for her book "One of Ours". Other works include, "Alexander's Bridge" (1912), "O Pioneers!" (1913), "My Antonia" (1918), "A Lost Lady" (1923), "The Professor's House" (1925), "My Mortal Enemy" (1926), "Death Comes for the Archbishop" (1927), "Shadows on the Rock" (1931), "Lucy Gayheart" (1935), and "Sapphira and the Slave Girl" (1940). Other literary awards she earned include the Howell's Medal from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1930, and the Gold Medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1944. She is known for her narratives of the pioneer American West, her writings a celebration of the strength and courage of the frontier settlers. - https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/182/willa-cather
"Willa Cather came to Jaffrey, New Hampshire for the first time in 1917. While visiting her friends Isabelle and Jan Hambourg at the Shattuck Inn early that summer, Cather discovered a place that would become, as Edith Lewis notes, "the one she found best to work in." She settled into two rooms on the third floor of the inn where, from the windows of the end room, she had a view of Mount Monadnock and the surrounding woods and pastures.
Before her death in 1947, Cather requested that she be buried in the Old Burying Ground behind the Meeting House in Jaffrey. Edith Lewis, with the help of the Austermanns (daughter and son-in-law of the Shattucks), made the arrangements. Cather's simple gravestone sits near a wooded area on the edge of the cemetery near clusters of rhododendron bushes."
https://cather.unl.edu/community/tours/jaffrey