Dr. Leonard Bacon was for many years pastor of this church. Underneath is a crypt containing the remains and tombstones of many of the Puritan fathers and their families; and here lies the body of Abigail Pierson, sister of the first president of Yale, and wife of John Davenport, Jr. While around and beneath Center Church “the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep,” the oldest cemetery now existing is that on Grove Street. Many distinguished sons of New Haven are buried there, among them Rear-Admiral Andrew H. Foote, General Amos B. Eaton, Admiral Francis H. Gregory, General Alfred H. Terry, Noah Webster, Lyman Beecher, Benjamin Silliman, Theodore Winthrop, Jedediah Morse (father of American geography), the elder President Dwight and President Day, Colonel David Humphreys, aide on the staff of General Washington, Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton-gin, Jehudi Ashmun, first colonial agent at Liberia, Governors Ingersoll, Baldwin, Edwards, and many others eminent in business and professional life. Tottering old men sometimes point to places where Nathan Hale made his great leap, where [Illustration: Eli Whitney] John C. Calhoun got his boots made, where Joel Barlow ate his hasty pudding, the porch where Commodore Hull liked to sit; and tell no end of stories about visits of Lafayette, James Monroe and “Old Hickory.” These are innocent chroniclers, forgetting the present in the glorious past, and we must allow a little for the play of the imagination; but when they aver that Noah Webster, as a lieutenant commanding a company of Yale students, once escorted General Washington through the town and received a compliment therefor, an approving nod is in order, for the great lexicographer recorded the incident in his diary “at the day and time of it.” Visitors frequently refer to the city as an overgrown village. It is hard for a New York man to realize as he strolls through the ample grounds of his New Haven friends, that he is in a city of more than one hundred thousand inhabitants. The value put upon breathing-places is shown in the large tracts of land devoted to public purposes. One walks hardly ten minutes in any direction without coming upon a square shaded by graceful elms and carpeted by a cleanly shaven lawn; while the margins of the city by river and sound [Illustration: EAST ROCK PARK.] abound in tastefully arranged parks. The transformation of the two great wooded ridges beyond the dwelling-line into well-graded drives, art vying with nature to please the eye and win the soul to beauty, completes the impression sometimes expressed, that New Haven is an immense village encircled by gardens.