Evergreen Cemetery

Evergreen Cemetery in New Haven is where William Chester Minor was buried in 1920, after a life spent for decades in institutions. Its modest memorial, set within a landscape the book describes as hemmed by a high fence and close to a slum, becomes a measure of how unevenly the story’s dead were remembered: Minor’s work helped shape the Oxford English Dictionary, while George Merrett, his victim, was left without a grave marker.

Setting and Boundaries

A high chain-link fence surrounds Evergreen Cemetery, separating it from what the account calls an angry part of New Haven and placing it well away from the stern elegance of Yale. The contrast makes the cemetery more than a final resting place in the book’s closing pages: its physical boundaries locate Minor’s grave amid social conditions far removed from the prestige associated with his scholarly achievement.

Minor’s Burial and Grave

Minor died on Friday, 26 March 1920, aged eighty-five years and nine months. The following Monday afternoon, he was taken to his old hometown and buried in the family plot established by his missionary father, Eastman Strong Minor. His grave is marked by a small, unadorned stone of reddish sandstone bearing only his name. Nearby, an angel stands on a plinth, gazing upward; its engraved motto is the hymn title My Faith Looks Up to Thee.

Memorials and Unequal Remembrance

The contrast between the cemetery’s memorials and Minor’s public legacy is stark. The book presents the Oxford English Dictionary, to which Minor contributed scores of thousands of illustrative quotations, as a lasting remembrance of him. Yet at Evergreen Cemetery his own marker is small and undistinguished, and the fence and nearby slum underscore the obscurity in which he died. His contribution survives in a monumental work, while the grave itself offers little indication of the scale of that achievement.

The account sets Evergreen Cemetery against the resting place of George Merrett at Tooting Cemetery: Merrett’s grave, too, has no marker, only a patch of discoloured grass and settled earth. The comparison makes the two memorials an ethical counterpoint. Minor is remembered through the dictionary he helped make, but Merrett—the innocent man whose killing set the story in motion—has no comparable public monument. A cemetery superintendent, Dale Fiore, later supplied the author with details about Minor’s burial, including the coffin’s length, the depth of the grave, and the names of those buried nearby; the account gives no measurements, but records how such particulars helped recover the physical facts of a grave otherwise marked only by a name.