Tours

Join Darlene Casella on a tour of the cemetery from April through November. Her tours provide a history of the cemetery and information about the notables buried there, as well as many interesting facts and stories with lively discussions about the cemetery’s residents. Please consult this website for any changes or cancelations. Heavy rain or storms cancel tours. In addition, private group tours with Darlene can be arranged by calling her at 203-777-3887.

 

June 10, 10:00 a.m. (Saturday) — This tour is canceled.

June 23, 12:00 p.m. (Friday)

July 1, 10:00 a.m. (Saturday)

July 15, 10:00 a.m. (Saturday)

September 16, 10:00 a.m. (Saturday)

October 4, 11:30 a.m. (Wednesday)

October 14, 10:00 a.m. (Saturday)

October 31, 12:00 a.m. (Tuesday, Halloween)

November 15, 11:30 a.m. (Wednesday)

November 25, 10:00 a.m. (Saturday)

 

 

The accompanying material relates to scientists and engineers buried in the Grove Street Cemetery. It was prepared to be recorded on tape and, with the aid of a portable player, to serve for three self-guided tours, each requiring about thirty minutes time. Actual recording never occurred.

 

The scripts contain only a partial listing of all scientists and engineers in the cemetery. There is, for example, no one who died recently. The date of most recent death is 1976.

 

Individuals are listed accompanied by a brief summary of information about each one. So as to help a stranger find a particular grave, preceding this individual information is a description of where the gave is located, in terms of street and number, and of the type of gravestone.

 

The material was assembled initially following a question from Elona Vaisnys, Editor, Faculty of Engineering. She had found a newspaper story about a civil engineering professor at Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia. He had his class meet in a local cemetery at the grave of Hardy Cross. Cross was a native of the area who, in the 1930s, devised a numerical procedure for calculating stresses in complicated structures with many interconnected parts. The resulting “Hardy Cross Method” was widely used for structural design in the era before computers. Ms. Vaisnys wondered whether there was anyone in the Grove Street Cemetery at whose gave it might be appropriate for a Yale engineering class to meet. When it turned out that there are a number of possibilities, it was she who proposed tape recording the material.