David Sloan

Even though tech bros are trying, they're in a long line of people who have said, well, I'm going to be the first, and we're still waiting for one to show up.

Yeah, I think so.

So in the 18th century, many small towns or larger towns in the United States had a civic cemetery, a government cemetery, a public cemetery.

And then they had churchyards.

And then they would actually have private, small, really small family cemeteries.

And so you would have this mixture.

It was a simple, say, quarter acre, half acre, and you just buried people in rows all the way along.

It was a very functional, practical space.

There wasn't a lot of greenery.

There wasn't a lot of nature.

It was mostly nature.

Gravestones.

And then in the late 18th century, as the cities grow, that begins to put pressure on the churchyards and those older civic cemeteries.

And so people begin to think about how can we slightly suburbanize the dead to create more permanent places.

And so in 1796, James Hill House was a very popular guy, prominent guy in New Haven says he went to a friend's farm where there was a little family cemetery.

It was sort of being taken over by nature.

And he goes, that's not good.

Slowly, the city is expanding.

The early farms, they might totally disrupt or take down all of the stones and the burials.

So let's put everybody in one place where we can have a nonprofit organization that oversees the care of the dead.