Grove Street Cemetery Named National Landmark

The Grove Street Cemetery will mark its designation as a National Historic Landmark with a special ceremony set for Saturday, September 23, at 2:30 p.m.

The cemetery was recently designated a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, which puts the cemetery in the company of those select sites considered to “possess exceptional value or quality in interpreting the heritage of the United States.”

Only three percent of all properties listed in the National Register of Historic Places are designated as National Historic Landmarks. The Grove Street Cemetery is one of only 60 National Historic Landmarks in Connecticut. It will be the ninth such landmark in New Haven, the city with the most national historic landmarks in the state. It is one of very few cemeteries to be designated a landmark anywhere in the U.S.

Saturday’s event will feature songs and a proclamation, along with remarks from New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr., cemetery chairman; Yale President Emeritus Howard R. Lamar; and Robert J. Leeney, editor emeritus at the New Haven Register and a leading historian of the New Haven community.

A reception will follow in the Common Room of the McDougal Center at the Yale Hall of Graduate Studies, 320 York Street.