⚰️ A Fictional Historical Interview with James Hillhouse
Travel in Time with Dan | The New Haven Green, New Haven, Connecticut
⚠️ Author’s Note: The following is a fictional historical interview. James Hillhouse (1754–1832) was a real American statesman, Senator, and civic leader who played a central role in transforming the New Haven Green and establishing Grove Street Cemetery, the first planned cemetery in the United States. This imagined conversation is written as a tribute to his vision, his civic courage, and his lasting impact on New Haven. The historical facts are real. The dialogue is creative fiction, inspired by his documented life and legacy.
📍 Setting: The New Haven Green, New Haven, Connecticut — circa 1797
It is a grey autumn morning, and the New Haven Green stretches before me in all its quiet, complicated glory. Church steeples rise at the edges and center. Yale’s buildings frame the distance. And beneath the grass… beneath every step I take across this peaceful open space… lie thousands of the dead, undisturbed for generations. A well-dressed, purposeful man is standing near the center of the Green, hands clasped behind his back, looking at the ground with the expression of someone who sees not what is there but what needs to happen next. He turns as I approach, and there is nothing haunted about him despite the setting. He looks like a man with a plan.
Dan: Mr. Hillhouse, thank you for meeting me here on the Green. I have to say, knowing what I know about what lies beneath us, it feels slightly different to walk across this grass than it did before.
Hillhouse: (with a dry half-smile) That reaction is precisely the problem I am trying to solve. When the living cannot walk comfortably across the common ground of their own city because of what has accumulated beneath it, something must change. New Haven deserves better than this… and so, frankly, do the dead.
Dan: Let’s start at the beginning. The New Haven Green has been the heart of this city since 1638. For most of the first 150 years, it served as the primary burial ground. How did something so central to civic life become a public health crisis?
Hillhouse: (turning to look across the Green with the assessing eye of a man who has been studying this problem for years) Time and success, paradoxically. When New Haven was a small settlement, burying the dead here made complete sense. The Green was the center of everything. It was the marketplace, the civic space, the place where the community gathered. It was natural and right that the dead should rest at the center of the community that had loved them.
But the city grew. And kept growing. And the Green, fixed in size, unable to expand, received generation after generation of the departed. For a hundred and fifty years, every New Haven family brought their dead here. The mathematics of that eventually become impossible to ignore.
Dan: How bad had it become?
Hillhouse: (plainly, without dramatizing) Overcrowded beyond any reasonable management. The ground in certain areas has been disturbed and redisturbed so many times that the integrity of what lies beneath cannot be reliably known. There are public health concerns, legitimate ones, about what proximity to so many remains means for the living who gather here daily. And there is a practical problem of space… the city cannot continue to bury its dead here indefinitely, and we have been operating as though it can.
Something had to be done. The question was what, and who would have the courage to do it.
Dan: And you stepped forward to answer that question.
Hillhouse: I stepped forward because someone had to. (simply) That is usually how civic leadership works. Not because one person possesses superior wisdom or authority, but because the problem is real and visible, and action is needed. And most people are waiting for someone else to begin.
I looked at this Green, and I saw two things simultaneously. They were the sacred history it represented, and the genuine harm that continuing the current arrangement was causing. Holding both of those things in mind at once, without dismissing either, was the necessary starting point.
Dan: The solution you developed was the Grove Street Cemetery, the first planned cemetery in the United States. What was the thinking behind it?
Hillhouse: The key word is planned. What we had here on the Green was organic. It grew without design, without system, without any vision of what it would eventually become. The result is what you see, or rather, what you don’t see, because what lies beneath this grass has no coherent organization whatsoever.
Grove Street Cemetery would be different from the ground up. Laid out deliberately. Organized by family plots so that the dead could rest together with their people. Designed with pathways and plantings so that it would be a dignified and even beautiful place for the living to visit. A place that honored the dead with intention rather than simply accommodating them by default.
Dan: There’s a remarkable and somewhat haunting detail about what happened in the transition. The tombstones were moved to Grove Street, but the bodies were not. Five thousand to ten thousand people are estimated to still be buried right here beneath the Green. Was that the plan from the beginning?
Hillhouse: (a pause, honest about the complexity) It was the practical reality, yes. Moving the stones, the markers, the inscriptions, the visible record of who had lived and died was achievable. Moving the remains themselves, given the state of many of them after generations in the ground and given the considerable cost of such an undertaking, was not.
I will not pretend that sits entirely comfortably with me. There is something unresolved about it… the names in one place, the people in another. But the alternative was to do nothing, which would have served neither the living nor the dead. We made the best decision available to us with the resources and circumstances we had.
Dan: Hurricane Sandy in 2012, well beyond your time, uprooted a historic tree on this Green and revealed human remains and skulls tangled in its roots. In a very literal sense, the past came to the surface.
Hillhouse: (quietly) That does not surprise me. The past has a way of doing that, with or without storms. You can relocate the markers. You cannot relocate the reality of what lies beneath. History is stubborn. It waits.
I think there is something worth sitting with in that image… the roots of a living thing, drawing sustenance from the ground, intertwined with what has been buried there for centuries. The past and the present, literally entangled. Unable to fully separate one from the other.
That is perhaps a more honest picture of how history actually works than we usually allow ourselves to contemplate.
Dan: Let’s talk about the Center Church. It was built directly over part of the original cemetery, and its basement crypt still contains the original tombstones. That’s an extraordinary decision to build a house of worship literally on top of a burial ground.
Hillhouse: It was not carelessness. It was an acknowledgment. The congregation that built Center Church understood what lay beneath and chose to honor it rather than ignore it. The crypt preserves what would otherwise have been lost entirely: the inscriptions, the names, the dates, the small carved details that tell you something about who a person was and how their community wished to remember them.
Walk down into that crypt, and you are walking into the 17th and 18th centuries in a way that no book can fully replicate. The stones are there. The names are there. The people are there, beneath your feet, exactly where they have always been.
Dan: The church also has a connection to Abraham Lincoln. It’s said he heard an influential anti-slavery sermon there that helped solidify his resolve. Does it strike you that a building erected over colonial graves became a place that helped shape the thinking of a president who ended slavery?
Hillhouse: (with genuine wonder) History is rarely linear and never simple. A burial ground becomes a church becomes a place where a future president’s conscience is stirred, becomes, eventually, a factor in the liberation of millions of people.
You cannot plan for those connections. You can only build institutions of sufficient integrity and purpose that they continue to matter across generations… that they continue to be the kind of place where important things happen, where important thinking occurs, where the community brings its most serious questions.
That is the argument for building well and building for the long term. You cannot know what your institution will eventually be asked to carry. You can only ensure it is strong enough to carry things you haven’t yet imagined.
Dan: The Green itself has an almost bewildering range of historical connections. Benedict Arnold drilled the militia here. His first wife is buried here. Eli Whitney studied nearby at Yale. Noah Webster walked these paths. What does it feel like to be the steward of a place that has witnessed so much?
Hillhouse: (with a mixture of pride and humility) Overwhelming, if I am honest. The New Haven Green is not merely a park or a pleasant open space. It is a compressed archive of American history and the arguments, the tragedies, the ambitions, the failures, and the achievements of several generations of people who were, like all of us, simply trying to build something worth building.
Arnold is a complicated figure — brilliant, brave, and ultimately a traitor whose name became synonymous with betrayal. Yet his 1st wife rests here, and she was not responsible for his choices. History asks us to hold that complexity without resolving it too quickly into simple judgments.
That is true of most things, I find. The people and the places that matter most resist simple characterization. They demand that you sit with the full picture.
Dan: You were also a United States Senator, a Yale treasurer, and one of the most influential civic figures in Connecticut history. Yet it is this work — the Green, the cemetery, the public health decision — that may be your most lasting legacy. Does that surprise you?
Hillhouse: (considering this carefully) A Senator’s votes can be undone by future Senates. Financial decisions can be reversed. But the physical transformation of a city… the creation of a new institution, the resolution of a problem that had been accumulating for a hundred and fifty years… that tends to endure.
I am glad if this is remembered as meaningful work. It was. Every city needs people willing to look at the problems that have been quietly worsening for generations: the problems everyone acknowledges, but no one addresses because they are complicated and expensive and guaranteed to upset someone… and simply begin.
Dan: The leadership lesson I take from your story is that great leaders must balance progress with respect for the past. How do you think about that balance?
Hillhouse: (turning to look across the Green one final time, the autumn light falling across the grass that covers ten thousand souls)
The past is not the enemy of progress. That is the first thing to understand. Too many leaders make the mistake of treating what came before as an obstacle to be removed rather than a foundation to be built upon. The bodies beneath this Green are not a problem. They are the city’s ancestors. They deserve honor even as the city moves forward.
The question is never whether to respect the past. The answer to that is always yes. The question is how to respect it in a way that does not prevent the living from thriving. Moving the stones but not the bodies was an imperfect solution. It was also an honest one. An acknowledgment that we could do some things and not others, and that partial progress was better than paralysis.
Great leaders are not people who find perfect solutions. They are people who find the best available solution, implement it with integrity, and remain honest about what it does and does not accomplish.
(He looks down at the grass beneath his feet for a long moment)
Five thousand to ten thousand people lie beneath where we are standing. They built this city. They deserve to be remembered. The least I could do was ensure that the living city they built continues to function. And that their names, at least, are preserved somewhere that honors them.
It was not enough. It was what we could do. And it was worth doing.
Dan: Mr. Hillhouse… thank you. This has been one of the most thought-provoking conversations I’ve ever had standing on a piece of grass.
Hillhouse: (with a quiet smile, turning to go)
That is the thing about the New Haven Green, Mr. Blanchard. It has never been just a piece of grass. It has always been everything that happened here. And everything still waiting to be discovered beneath it.
(He walks away across the Green, footsteps silent on the grass, until he disappears into the grey autumn morning.)
I stood alone on the New Haven Green for a long time after he left. Students crossed at the edges, heading to and from Yale. A dog chased a ball near the far tree line. Someone ate lunch on a bench near Center Church, completely at ease.
Beneath all of it… beneath every footstep, every picnic, every protest and graduation ceremony, and ordinary Tuesday afternoon this Green has ever hosted, ten thousand people waited in the quiet dark, undisturbed, unmoved, still exactly where their families had placed them.
The tombstones went to the Grove Street Cemetery perimeter. The names went with them.
The people stayed right here under our feet.
Walk carefully on the New Haven Green. You are walking on centuries.
And the centuries are walking back. ⚰️
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