Old Burying Ground
Beaufort, Carteret County, North Carolina
Marker Inscription
Old Burying Ground. Deeded to town, 1731, by Nathanael Taylor. Capt. Otway Burns of the War of 1812, Revolutionary and Civil War soldiers are buried here.
Erected by North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources
The Story
Deeded to the town of Beaufort in 1731 by Nathanael Taylor, this seaside cemetery holds generations of the coastal community's dead. Among them is Captain Otway Burns, a celebrated privateer of the War of 1812, alongside soldiers of the Revolution and the Civil War. Its weathered stones trace more than a century of American conflict and coastal life.
Why it matters
The Old Burying Ground gathers into one plot the sacrifices of three American wars, making the town's long history visible in stone.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the time this ground was set aside in 1731, Beaufort was already a small but busy port on North Carolina's Outer Banks, a place where the ocean was both livelihood and threat. The colony was still young, thinly settled, and oriented toward the water β ships carried naval stores, fish, and timber out, and news of the wider world in.
A coastal town in this era lived close to death. Storms, shipwrecks, fever, and the ordinary hazards of a maritime life meant a burying ground was among the first civic necessities, right alongside a church and a wharf. Deeding a plot to the town was an act of foresight: a shared, permanent place for the community to lay its dead.
Over the century that followed, that same shoreline would send its sons into three separate American wars. The graves gathered here quietly record a coastal community that endured from the colonial period into the age of the young republic and beyond.
People & events
The ground owes its existence to Nathanael Taylor, who deeded it to the town in 1731. It was the kind of gift that shapes a place for centuries β an ordinary act of civic generosity whose consequences long outlived the giver.
The most celebrated figure resting here is Captain Otway Burns, a privateer of the War of 1812. Privateers were privately owned vessels licensed by the government to prey on enemy shipping, and men like Burns became folk heroes for harrying a far more powerful naval enemy at sea. His grave ties this quiet plot to one of the young nation's early trials.
But Burns is not alone in his service. The ground also holds soldiers of the Revolution and of the Civil War, men separated by generations yet buried within the same low walls. Standing among them, you sense a town that sent its people to fight in conflict after conflict and brought them home to the same patch of earth.
Its place in the American story
Small coastal burying grounds like this one are where the national story becomes tangible and local. The abstractions of textbooks β the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War β here become individual names on weathered stone, each belonging to a real person from one small town.
That a single modest plot should contain veterans of three American wars is itself a kind of history lesson. It shows how deeply and repeatedly ordinary communities were drawn into the making and testing of the nation, from the fight for independence through the long, painful reckoning of the Civil War.
A privateer like Otway Burns also reminds us of a mostly forgotten kind of American warfare, waged by private citizens at sea. His presence here connects a windswept Carolina graveyard to the wider Atlantic world in which the early United States had to fight for its footing.
If you visit
Come expecting a shaded, hushed place rather than a monument. Old maritime burying grounds like this tend to be canopied by live oaks, carpeted in shell and sand, and full of stones tilted by centuries of settling ground and salt air.
Walk slowly and read the markers. Look for the range of dates and the different eras of service they represent β you are, in effect, reading a town's whole history in stone, from the colonial era through the Civil War. Seek out the resting place of the War of 1812 privateer, and let it stand for all the sailors and soldiers around him.
Beaufort itself is a walkable waterfront town, so this ground fits naturally into a slow afternoon of wandering historic streets near the sea. Treat it as a quiet anchor to the visit: a reminder that the pretty harbor town has been sending people out into American history, and welcoming them back, for a very long time.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the markerβs inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- Β· Otway Burns
- Β· Nathanael Taylor
Themes & tags
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