At the corner of Locust and Myrtle—the cemetery’s paths are given names like those of city streets—is the second of two lots that were reserved for Yale. The people buried here range from eminent professors and Yale presidents to eighteenth-century students who died while at college. The white round-topped stone marks the grave of Mary Goodman, an African American businesswoman who left her $5,000 savings to Yale to provide scholarships to African American divinity students. When she died in 1872 without providing for her burial, the university arranged to have her interred in the Yale lot.

Photograph by Jake Wyman