St. Peter's Old Burial Ground (Glebe), Maitland, NSW, Australia

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St. Peter's Old Burial Ground This Church of England burial ground is the oldest in the Hunter Valley, and belonged to the first St. Peter's, East Maitland. The first burial was made as early as 1828 and thereafter it was in use for a period of more than seventy years. Headstone Transcriptions
Because of its lonely and isolated position on the hill below the Rathluba property, the burial ground has become overgrown and ruined. The silent tombs are a reminder of far off days when daily life and social conditions were vastly different from our own. The older stones were often quaint and their messages tell us much about the ideas and convictions of the early settlers. Since East Maitland was once the capital town of the North, family names from as far south as Windsor and as far away as the North West are to be found here. One well known pioneer who found his last resting place in St. Peter's Old Burial Ground was the Police Magistrate, Denny Day, who captured the Jew Boy Gang and apprehended the perpetrators of the Myall Creek Massacre. Other well known pioneers such as Samuel Clift and John Eckford are buried here. and convicts and soldiers lie side by side. In the very early days when there were no other cemeteries, Roman Catholic and Presbyterian burials were also received for a time. Although it was in use from an early stage the burial ground was not consecrated until St. Peter's Day, 1843, when Bishop Broughton performed the ceremony in a tent erected on the ground. To avoid fording the creek through the Glebe, the hearse used to follow a bush track through Rathluba, from the Buchanan road, but the route has now been engulfed by a housing estate.	The need to record the remaining history from the burial ground became evident with the threat of bad weathering and also vandalism. Fortunately, however, there still remain many graves of outstanding historical value. The massive Clift vault with its double chest tombs, which was resealed following desecration, was said to the largest and most ornamented in the colony outside Sydney. Many graves record the birthplaces of the deceased. Some stones have rhymes or may carry warnings to all who read them, while others tell something of the life of the person buried there. Early ones are often unusual and may bear the spelling mistakes of an ignorant mason. For these reasons the resulting historical survey, which is a complete record of all the remaining gravestones, presents the full inscriptions. Masons' marks have been recorded where they were easily legible. In the pages which follow, the inscriptions were copied from headstones, or as is individually stated in some cases, from square tombs, chest tombs or vaults. It should be assumed that any spelling mistakes were originally made by them. James Waddell
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