The graveyards attached to the churches in Dorchester (St George's, All Saints, the Holy Trinity, and St Peter) were declared to be nearing capacity in a report published in 1852 and burials were to be discontinued on 1st January 1855.

Pressure for burials in Fordington (which was not at the time part of Dorchester) was increased following a number of deaths arising from an outbreak of cholera in 1854. This resulted from an enforced intake in August of 700 convicts from the Millbank Prison in London, where cholera was rife, to the Barracks in Dorchester, which were unusually empty because most of the military had been mobilised to take part in the Crimean War. Two women in Holloway Row were contracted to do the laundry for the prisoners and it is believed that this is how the disease was first introduced into Fordington. The Mill Street area was severely overcrowded (ironically because it was the only area of land in Fordington not owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, which refused to release any of its land for development) and the cholera spread rapidly in the appallingly insanitary conditions which existed in the area.

At least 30 people died of the disease in September 1854 alone, and all of them are likely to have been buried in St George's churchyard, adding further to the pressure on burial space there which had already been recognised. In 1866 the Duchy of Cornwall gave land (formerly part of the Farthinghold Tenement) for use as an extension of the churchyard and this is the area which we now know as ‘Old Ground'. The ‘New Ground' was purchased in 1885 to complete the Cemetery as we know it today.

In 1907, when the church was being enlarged, some gravestones were moved and Rev RG Bartelot, Vicar of St Georges Church (1906-1936), recorded the inscriptions before they were moved. He subsequently compiled a list of monumental inscriptions around 1914-17. At some point after this the churchyard was cleared and very few of the monuments remain. These records have been transcribed to FaG and can be identified where the inscription surname is in CAPITALS.