Elmsford Colonial Cemetery

Today Laurie and I went on another eighteenth-century adventure. Our first stop was the tiny graveyard in Elmsford known as the Colonial Cemetery. The church in the picture above is the Elmsford Reformed Church, which was built in 1783. All of the gravestones are quite far away from the church, perhaps twenty or thirty feet, and the eighteenth-century stones are widely dispersed. Also, all of the eighteenth-century stones face out towards the road, that is, in the same direction that the church faces.


You can see in the photo below that the stones along the front wall of the cemetery are tipping over and some are quite close to falling down onto the sidewalk below. One has already fallen and broken into several pieces.

Here's one leaning stone that I was able to photograph by getting down onto the sidewalk: Lydia, wife of the Reverend John Townley, who died in 1795 age 50.

 

 Here's another view from the sidewalk, showing the leaning stones and a part of the stone that fell.

And here's a lovely, relatively well-preserved urn and willow on the grave of Sarah Van Wart, who died age 27 in 1839.

Sarah's stone stands beside the monument to Isaac Van Wart, one of the captors of Major John Andre (Andre passed St. George's Church twice in September 1780 as a prisoner of war.)

Lastly, here is a general view of the cemetery with the church in the background. One interesting thing we noted is that while the eighteenth-century stones face the road, a few stones from the 1830s were faced in the opposite direction. Later stones again turned toward the road.