The Graveyard in 2014

Today I decided to walk over to the graveyard to see how my old friends were doing in the New Year. This March, it will be 241 years since Isaac Lounsbury, owner of the oldest inscribed gravestone in the cemetery, was buried. I can't say his stone looks like new, but it certainly looks a million times better than it did before its restoration.

The cemetery itself is wearing its age well, too. The snow is gone (but not for long!) and while there is a lot more to do, the place has definitely benefited from all the work we have put into it over the past year. As you may recall, we had several restoration days over the spring and summer, and Hans has taken on the role of unofficial groundskeeper. The town has also been pretty good about removing the leaves that Hans gathered up throughout the fall.


Hans moved these stones back into alignment after one of them had shifted. I like how the surface of the granite is reflective at certain angles, and how the stones are smooth on top and rough on the sides.

Speaking of Isaac Lounsbury, here's his stone, looking better than ever. Thomas Brown (the carver) would be proud of the work that the Cornells have done. I have to say, though I love the 18th-century death's heads and cherubs, this stone is really beautifully done - it may even be the most beautiful stone in the cemetery (in my opinion, of course!). Its beauty lies in the simplicity of the design and its perfect execution.

Charles Haight is looking pretty good as well. Sadly, this stone will never look quite like it used to, but I think it looks as well as it possibly could given the circumstances. While no gravestone should be allowed to decay the way that Haight's stone did, it was especially unfortunate given the fact that Haight was such a great benefactor of St. George's. It was his land, after all, that the church and its graveyard were built upon.

But perhaps no one gave more for others than the soldiers buried in the southeast corner of the cemetery. Thanks to an incredible spreadsheet created by the White Plains Historical Society, I can tell you which people could be buried beneath this marker, but I can't be more specific than that. Other historical societies have been successful in identifying the soldiers buried in nearby graveyards, and we are hoping that with further research we will be as well.


Many of the stones in the cemetery have lines of verse beneath their biographical inscriptions. I don't think I've seen any with as short a verse as this one, which I believe says "Jesus my all." A quick Google search revealed that "Jesus, My All" was the name of a hymnal written in the mid-19th century. Perhaps it was a favorite of Sarah Elizabeth Miller, who was born in 1809 and died in 1887.

Near to Sarah Miller's gravestone is this pile of broken sandstone pieces beside their base.


And not far off from that is the dig site itself. Can you spot Feature 1 (marked by stones), Feature 2 (marked by the pillar we removed from the ground), and the rectangular outline of the remaining pillars? I have to say that we left the place pretty neat! You'd hardly know that only a few months ago there were dozens of people with shovels, trowels, and screens all over the place.


On my way out I stopped by the gravestone of Enoch Greene to get a decent photo ...

... and at the gravestone of Susan Thorn to ponder: why does her stone, and that of her infant son Stephen Jr., face a different direction than her husband, Stephen Thorn? Susan, whose maiden name was Susan Weeks, died in 1852, as did her baby. Stephen died in 1891. I have theories about the patterns of stone orientation in the cemetery, but it's still mostly a mystery to me.