If someone in your family is connected to Old Town Cemetery, you are dealing with one of the
oldest burial grounds in North Carolina. It sits at North Churton and West Tryon streets, it was
established in 1757, and it holds 184 marked graves. It stopped taking new burials a long time ago,
which means most families who come to us with Old Town on their mind are doing one of two things:
holding a memorial for someone whose people are buried there, or standing in a plot they cannot
add to and working out what to do instead.
Both are normal. Neither is a problem. This page is about what your options actually are.
What Old Town Cemetery Is
Old Town is a working piece of the town’s history rather than a monument behind a fence. It is
open to the public from sunrise to sunset and people walk through it constantly. Among the marked
graves are William Hooper, one of three North Carolina signers of the Declaration of Independence,
a nineteenth century governor of North Carolina who also served as a United States senator and
secretary of the Navy, and John Berry, the brick mason who built the Orange County Courthouse.
That history matters for a practical reason. Families with roots here often assume they can be
buried alongside their people and are surprised to learn they cannot. The cemetery is historic and
closed to new interments. If that is where you thought this was heading, the ground has shifted and
you need a different plan quickly, usually within a few days.
When the Family Plot Is Closed
There is a version of this conversation that goes badly, and it goes badly because a funeral
home treats a closed cemetery as an upsell. What you actually need is a short list of real options
and honest prices against each one.
Cremation keeps every option open. Cremated remains can be scattered, kept, divided among
family, or interred later somewhere that is still accepting burials, and none of that has to be
decided in the first week. Aquamation does the same thing by a different process. It uses heated
water and an alkaline solution instead of fire, and it is the reason a lot of families find us in
the first place. We are the only provider of it in the Triangle region.
Green burial is the other direction people go, and it suits families who wanted the old
churchyard feeling that a historic cemetery has. No embalming chemicals, a biodegradable casket or
a shroud, and ground that is managed as habitat rather than mown lawn. We handle the majority of
natural burials at Bluestem Conservation Cemetery, a conservation burial ground in the county,
where the land is placed under permanent protection rather than developed later.
Holding a Service Near the Cemetery
A memorial does not have to happen where the body is. Some families gather at the cemetery
itself because that is where the person’s parents and grandparents are, then come to us afterwards,
or the reverse. Others hold nothing at the graveside at all and do the whole thing indoors.
What we would say, having watched a lot of families make this decision under time pressure, is
that the location matters less than whether the service sounds like the person. A reading they
loved, done properly in a room, lands harder than a formal graveside that nobody recognises.
Practical Things Worth Knowing
- The cemetery is open sunrise to sunset, so a service there has to sit inside daylight. In winter
that is a real constraint on afternoon timings. - Parking around North Churton and West Tryon is street parking. For anything larger than an
immediate family gathering, plan where people will leave cars before the day. - Older markers are fragile. If relatives want to find a specific grave, allow time and take
someone who knows the layout. - If you want a reading, a piper or anything amplified, check with the town first. A historic
cemetery in a residential block has different expectations from a modern one.
Cost, Stated Plainly
Funeral pricing is opaque almost everywhere, and that is a choice providers make rather than a
rule they follow. Providers in the United States are required to hand you a general price list if
you ask in person.1 We publish ours instead, so you can compare before you contact
anybody, including us.
Direct cremation is the least expensive option we offer. A full service with a casket and a
graveside is the most. Aquamation and green burial sit in between, and neither carries a premium
for being the greener choice, which surprises people who expect to pay for the privilege.
Getting Here From Old Town Cemetery
The drive is short. Old Town Cemetery sits about 1.8 miles southeast of the funeral home on Meadowlands Drive, which in normal traffic is under ten minutes. Families often come straight from a viewing or a graveside back to us, or the other way around, and the distance is small enough that nobody has to plan the day around driving.
If you are coordinating a service and a burial on the same morning, tell us and we will build the timings around the cemetery rather than around our own schedule. Processions, pallbearers and clergy all need slack in the plan, and it is easier to add that at the start than to claw it back on the day.
Other parts of town have their own page: the cemetery on East Corbin Street and the streets around the courthouse. All of them are listed on our service area page.
Talking to Someone
If a death has already happened, call and we will walk you through the next few hours. There is no form to fill in first and nothing to prepare. If you are planning ahead instead, you can take as long as you want; preplanning appointments are unhurried by design, and writing your own arrangements down is the single kindest thing you can do for the people who will otherwise have to guess.
Our general price list is published on this site rather than held back until you ask. You should be able to compare what a funeral costs without having to make a phone call to find out.
Endswell Funeral Home
407 Meadowlands Dr, Hillsborough, NC 27278
(919) 907-9777
Researching a Family Grave Before You Plan
Families connected to an old burial ground almost always want to find the actual grave before
they decide anything, and it is worth doing that early rather than on the morning of a service.
Markers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries weather badly. Inscriptions that were legible
thirty years ago often are not now, and stones move.
Take somebody older than you if you can. The person who knows where the family is buried is
usually the person nobody thinks to ask, and that knowledge disappears fast. If the grave cannot
be found at all, that is more common than people expect and it is not a failure. Plenty of families
end up marking a person somewhere new precisely because the old ground no longer tells them
anything.
Two Mistakes Worth Avoiding
The first is deciding on a burial before checking that ground is available. It sounds obvious.
It happens weekly, because families assume a cemetery their people are in will take them too, and
by the time anybody checks, notices have gone out with a date on them.
The second is buying a casket before deciding on the disposition. A casket is one of the largest
single costs in a funeral and it is only required for some choices. Decide burial or cremation or
aquamation first, then price the things that choice actually needs.
Where We Are
What Families Say
Endswell holds a 4.9 star rating from 71 Google reviews.2 We are not going to reprint them here and tell you what they mean. Read them yourself, then read the reviews of every other funeral home you are considering, and pay attention to what people say about the week rather than the day. Anybody can run a good service. The difference shows in whether somebody answered the phone at two in the morning and whether the price at the end matched the price at the start.
Sources
1. Federal Trade Commission, The Funeral Rule. ftc.gov
2. Local Falcon location record for Endswell Funeral Home, Hillsborough, retrieved 9 September 2026.