Saint Augustine Chapel and Cemetery

St. Augustine Chapel and Cemetery occupy a city block in South Boston. The cemetery was founded in 1818 by Bishop John Cheverus to bury Father Francis Matignon, his close colleague in organizing the Catholic Church in New England. The brick chapel, dedicated on July 4, 1819, was built as a mortuary chapel for Matignon and was enlarged in 1831 with a narthex, transept, apse and sacristies. Its tall lancet windows and plain brick walls mark it as an early, simple example of Gothic Revival, and it is described as the oldest surviving Catholic church in Massachusetts. The cemetery holds about 639 gravestones, mostly white marble, along with priests buried beneath the chapel floor. It was Boston's first Catholic burying ground, and many Irish immigrants who died in cholera epidemics and fever outbreaks of the 1830s to 1850s are buried there. The last burial took place in the mid-1880s. A puddingstone wall surrounds the site.