New Bedford Hidden Cemetery Is Old But Not Forgotten

Now I love me some good trails-through-the-woods walks like most people, but I poked around the wooded trails of Pulaski Park for a while and couldn't really relax and enjoy it.

Something about the woods left me feeling anxious; a touch of the heebie-jeebies, if you will. Cue a tiny, hidden, super-old but still maintained burial ground

There's a small segment of people out there who won't find this surprising and those people either go to school at Pulaski Elementary, live nearby, or work for the city's cemetery department. These people are already familiar with the little Reynolds burial ground and probably don't think twice about it.

If you are one of the many who use Braley Road every single day, you may find yourself wondering what the heck we are talking about. However, if you are a pedestrian or a forever-passenger who loves looking out the window, you may have noticed the cement marker near the area of 1127 Braley Road that stands at the entrance of a long, grassy corridor.

If you use Google Maps aerial view, you won't even see it. You just see the outlines of someone's yard, a few trees, and then the Pulaski School property. It is in the "few trees" section that this cemetery is hidden.

We all know of the city's bigger cemeteries like the Rural Cemetery on Rockdale Avenue, and the Oak Grove Cemetery off of Mount Pleasant Street. This cemetery, however, is one of six small (closed) burial grounds that the city's cemetery department still maintains.

It is unclear how old the Reynolds Cemetery is. It holds only a handful of graves (11 from what we could count), with some reduced to a pile of rubble where headstones once stood. The headstones that are left are very old and mostly indiscernible. The gravesite that looked unlike any other was that of Baby Densmore, who died at birth on April 23, 1940. This grave marker appeared to be the most recent addition to the closed cemetery.

Unless you were poking around Pulaski Park, or just casually walking down Braley Road on your way to school, you may have never noticed the small narrow through-way. But even if this story has added no value to your life whatsoever, now you know about the hidden cemetery on Braley Road and maybe you'll be inspired to slow down and look twice at the stuff around you.