Woodside Cemetery

Woodside Cemetery is at 555 North Main Street in Cohasset. It is one of four cemeteries owned by the Town, and the Town lists it as established in 1906. The other three are much older: Beechwood (1737), Cedar Street (1760), and Green Gate (1820).

Woodside is often confused with Cohasset Central Cemetery, also on North Main Street. They are run very differently. Cohasset Central is privately owned by its lot owners and managed by a board. Woodside is a town cemetery, operated under the direction of the Select Board acting as Cemetery Commissioners, and day to day by the Town's Cemetery Department.

Who to contact

The Cemetery Department can be reached at 781-383-0273, and the Cemetery Administrator at 781-383-4100, extension 7000. The department handles burial requests and works with funeral directors, vault vendors, and monument companies. It will also help families look up historic burial information and arrange a visit, which is the best route if you are trying to find a grave here.

Burial eligibility follows Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 114 and the Town's own Rules and Regulations.

Veterans' graves

Working with the Town's Veterans Service Officer, the Cemetery Department makes sure veterans' graves have an American flag on Memorial Day, as state law requires. If you're worried a family member's grave might be missed, call the department ahead of time. How veteran flag placement works has more.

Plantings and decoration rules

The Town of Cohasset publishes cemetery Rules and Regulations, revised in 2023, that apply to its cemeteries. We were not able to retrieve the current document when writing this page, so we are not going to summarize rules we haven't read. Ask the Cemetery Department what is allowed before planting anything or leaving a seasonal decoration, and when decorations are cleared in spring.

If you'd like a Christmas wreath placed on the date the Town allows and removed at the end of the season, choose "Christmas Wreath / Décor" on the request form. For year-round plantings, see what to plant at a grave site.

Finding a burial here

We have not found a public online burial database for Woodside. Start with the Cemetery Department, which can look up records directly, and use volunteer transcriptions on Find a Grave as a cross-check. How to find an ancestor's grave on the South Shore covers the wider search.

If you can't get to Cohasset, we can find the stone and photograph it for a one-time fee of $15–$25.

Stone care here

A cemetery founded in 1906 holds mostly granite, with some marble from its earlier decades. Cohasset is a coastal town, and salt air feeds the lichen and algae that dull a stone and, on marble, slowly roughen the surface. Coastal plots generally want attention every 12 to 18 months rather than every two years — why coastal headstones need more frequent cleaning explains why.

We clean with D/2 Biological Solution over a minimum of three visits, with no pressure washing, no wire brushes, and nothing abrasive. The three-visit process covers what happens on site.