Meeting House Springs Cemetery in Carlisle, Pennsylvania

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Get directions Carlisle, Pennsylvania, USA

Coordinates: 40.21560, -77.21820
Cemetery ID:

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About these numbers These percentages indicate the number of Find a Grave memorials that have a grave photo or GPS coordinates. We don't know the total number of burials in a cemetery, so we cannot calculate a percentage of those with memorials, photos or GPS coordinates.

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Meeting House Springs Cemetery in North Middleton Township, located just under 2 miles northwest of the center of Carlisle, is thought to be the oldest cemetery in Cumberland County. It was the original site of the First Presbyterian Church, a one-room log church built at the site between 1734-1736 by early Scots-Irish settlers. In the 1750s, the congregation moved two miles southeast to Carlisle, the county seat, and built a new church there in the town square, while retaining the burial ground. The farmland surrounding the cemetery was sold in 1827 with the following stipulation: "Excepting and reserving always nevertheless all the ground which has been used, and it is now enclosed as a graveyard, or place for burying the dead on said premises, together with the wall or fence enclosing the same, with free and uninterrupted ingress, egress and regress to, into and from said graveyard." The church maintains the cemetery to this day and the cemetery remains active. It contains graves of veterans of the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. It is the site of the oldest known marked grave in Cumberland County, that of Janet Thomson who died in 1744. In 2009, the First Presbyterian Church published "Here Lyes the Body: The Story of Meeting House Springs" by Richard L. Tritt containing a detailed history of the cemetery along with photographs and inscriptions of gravestones, biographies, and archaeological findings from the site.