The 1845 Page family burial plot in Hartford

Spring Grove Cemetery is a cemetery located on Main Street in the Clay-Arsenal neighborhood of Hartford, Connecticut. Established in 1845, it is one of the city's oldest cemeteries and served as its first private non-sectarian cemetery. The cemetery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2011.

The land was originally farmland owned by the Page family. In 1845, Stephen Page buried his wife there, and the family began selling burial plots to others, which differed from the typical practice of selling only a right-to-interment. In 1864, a number of plot owners banded together to purchase the entire cemetery, establishing a non-profit association to manage the property three years later.

The cemetery covers about 34 acres of flat terrain and is accessed via a wrought-iron archway on Main Street. The roads are laid out in a rectilinear grid finished in pavement, gravel, and grass. In 1884, the association hired landscape designer Thomas Brown McClunnie to lay out the northwest quadrant. While McClunnie emphasized a parklike setting, he maintained a simple rectangular layout. The cemetery retains most of its 19th-century features, though a memorial chapel built in 1884 was destroyed by fire in 1904.

The grounds contain many notable burials, including artist Frederic Edwin Church, as well as the city's high-profile civic and business leaders and a substantial indigent population. The oldest monument on the property is that of the Page family, dated 1845.

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons