Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, New York, United States, is a non-profit, non-sectarian burying ground of about . It is the final resting place of numerous famous figures, including Washington Irving, who was a cofounder of the establishment. Incorporated in 1849 as Tarrytown Cemetery, it was renamed Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in 1865.
The cemetery is contiguous with, but separate from, the Burial Ground of the Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow, which was a setting for Washington Irving's famous story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The Rockefeller family estate, Kykuit, whose grounds abut Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, contains the private Rockefeller cemetery,The private Rockefeller burial ground at Kykuit is reserved for members of the John D. Rockefeller Jr. branch of the family. Family members and descendants of William Rockefeller Jr. are buried in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, at the family plot anchored by the William Rockefeller Mausoleum. which is located behind a high fence at the north end of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.
Sleepy Hollow Cemetery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2009. ()
History and design In 1847, the New York State Legislature passed the Rural Cemetery Act, which authorized commercial burial grounds in New York. The law led to the burial of human remains becoming a commercial business for the first time, replacing the practice of burying the dead in churchyards or on private farmland. Almost immediately after that, a group of prominent local residents, headed by author Washington Irving and Capt. Jacob Storm initiated the building of a modern burial ground in the Tarrytown area, as the Burying Ground at the Old Dutch Church no longer had adequate burial space for the growing community. Tarrytown Cemetery was incorporated on October 29, 1849. On April 11, 1865, it would be officially renamed Sleepy Hollow Cemetery—the name on which Washington Irving had insisted from the beginning, but was initially overruled. The new cemetery began with 39 acres north of the church graveyard, subsequently growing by about 41 acres in 1886 and an additional 10 acres in 1890.
It was designed as a garden—or rural—cemetery, a style that was popular in the United States and Europe during the mid-19th century. (Washington Irving was a strong proponent of the garden cemetery movement.) Jim Logan, superintendent of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, writes on his website, Sleepy Hollow Country: "Think of it as the Victorian version of therapeutic landscape architecture—a place where grief could unfold amid natural beauty rather than urban gloom."Not everybody, however, was happy with the cemetery's location near the Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow and its historic Burying Ground. Half a century later, prominent local historian Edgar Mayhew Bacon questioned "sticking your smart, modern cemetery, with its spic-span tombstones on the hill-top to overcrowd the simple relics of the venerable dead who sleep in the old graveyard below." Chronicles of Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow by Edgar Mayhew Bacon. The Knickerbocker Press. (1900), p. 16.
The building of this type of cemetery involved well-planned walkways and elaborately landscaped plantings of trees and shrubs.Harney, Marion (2014). Gardens and Landscapes in Historic Building Conservation, p. 102. John Wiley & Sons. The Tarrytown/Sleepy Hollow area, with its rolling hills, old-growth trees, and the gently flowing Pocantico River, was a perfect location for a garden cemetery. Before the widespread development of public parks, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, like other garden cemeteries, provided a place for the public to enjoy outdoor recreation in a park-like setting. In the 21st century, it is still a popular spot for locals to take a nature walk.
Names of prominent local families are found on stone-fronted family vaults built into the hillsides in the older section of the cemetery, but most of the burials are family plots with multiple tombstones. In the northern section, on the higher elevations, there are numerous mausoleums and large plots with elaborate monuments of "many New York achievers" of the Gilded Age.
The cemetery's historic Hillside Receiving Vault provided essential "cold storage" before the advent of modern steam shovels and backhoes. Built directly into a steep hillside, the solid masonry structure used the earth's natural insulation to hold bodies when the ground was too frozen for burial. It is a contributing structure to the cemetery's 2009 listing on the National Register of Historic Places.Although marked 1900 on an exterior plate, historians believe the vault's core dates back to the cemetery's founding in 1849. The vault gained international fame as the crypt of Barnabas Collins in the 1970 film House of Dark Shadows. No longer used for mass winter storage, it is part of official cemetery tours.
Purported "Headless Horseman" cemetery bridge. A popular feature is the cemetery’s rustic bridge over a Pocantico River ravine, near a small waterfall and the river’s natural Cascade Pool. Cemetery superintendent Jim Logan writes: "Visitors have long associated it with the famous bridge from Irving’s tale, though it’s a much later addition to the landscape. Still, there’s something fitting about it—a wooden span over running water, framed by autumn foliage, that captures the atmosphere of Irving’s story even if it wasn’t part of his original inspiration."
Notable monuments
The modest Washington Irving's gravestone (1859) is located in the Irving family plot, where his parents, brothers (including Peter Irving), nephews, and nieces are also buried. According to his nephew and literary assistant, Pierre Munroe Irving, the author had selected the specific place next to his mother when visiting the cemetery several days before his death. Creating a unique literary landmark, the author is buried close to the historic Burying Ground of the Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow, where the graves of people who inspired The Legend of Sleepy Hollow characters are located.
The 1926 gravestone index, The Old Dutch Burying Ground of Sleepy Hollow, describes it as follows: On the Northern edge of the burying ground, overlooking his beloved .... Hollow, rest the remains of the gentle Washington Irving: the shrine of thousands of pilgrims from the distant places of the earth. Marked by no tawdry memorial of elaborate sculpture, a simple marble slab indicates the grave; a slab ingeniously fashioned, with rounded comers and edges designed to foil souvenir collectors who have carried off piece-meal two earlier stones. While earlier grave decorations in the Old Dutch Burying Ground were carved from sandstone, Irving’s gravestone was made from white marble. It became the preferred material for Neoclassical architecture and decoration of the post-Revolutionary period, chosen for its association with the purity and idealized forms of ancient Greek and Roman art. Marble, however, proved to be a rather poor choice for exterior monuments: originally smooth and glistening, marble surfaces soften with time and become rough, grainy, and discolored.Williams, Gray (2003). Picturing Our Past: National Register Sites in Westchester County. Westchester County Historical Society. p. 94. . Also, like sandstone, marble is easy to chip. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was a common, though destructive, practice for tourists to chip off small pieces of sandstone and marble grave markers of famous people as souvenirs. The Irving gravestone that people see today is the third iteration of the original grave marker; as mentioned above, souvenir hunters chipped away at previous ones, which eventually had to be replaced. (By the end of the 19th century, newly developed power tools would make it practicable to carve gravestones and monuments out of durable granite.Williams, Gray (2003). Picturing Our Past: National Register Sites in Westchester County. Westchester County Historical Society. p. 95. .)
Irving's gravestone is the most visited place in the cemetery. In the words of the New York Supreme Court justice Isaac N. Mills: Sleepy Hollow... The genius of Irving, whose remains, at his own request, rest within her soil, that sweet and gentle Father of American Literature, has made her name known and loved, as far and as widely as the English tongue is spoken. Gallery
Darius Ogden Mills Mausoleum (1883), designed by the famous architect Richard Morris Hunt, was commissioned and built decades before Darius Ogden Mills' death in 1910. Its construction coincided with the height of the Gilded Age, a period when wealthy industrial families built increasingly elaborate monuments in garden cemeteries such as Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. A Roman temple-like structure with grand Ionic columns, it reflects the Neoclassical and Beaux-Arts styles favored by the era's elite. Unlike many traditional mausoleums, it is noted for having large, floor-to-ceiling windows on each side and in the roof, designed to capture light and highlight the silver-painted stars on the walls and floors; it creates a play of light that symbolizes eternal life and celestial presence. Visitors can see the ornate sarcophagi and interior decorations without entering, a rare feature in 19th-century funerary architecture.
The monument of Owen Jones (1884) is an example of Gothic Revival architecture, adorned with stonework and a life-sized marble statue of Jones, who was a dry goods store owner in Manhattan. This sculpture of Jones represents him in period costume.
The Civil War Soldiers Monument (1890) was erected in honor of the Union Army veterans of the American Civil War, most of whom served in Company H of the 32nd New York Infantry Regiment. The Company was composed exclusively of local volunteers from the Tarrytown area. They fought in the First Battle of Bull Run, the Peninsular Campaign, and the Battles of South Mountain, Antietam, and Chancellorsville. Many of them are buried in the cemetery, near the monument. Its granite base is topped by a 7-foot-6-inch bronze statue of a Union infantry soldier standing at "parade rest"; bronze plaques on the base list some 240 names.
John Hudson Hall Monument (1894) is one of the most popular and visually striking monuments in the cemetery. Hall was a highly successful paper manufacturer, a developer of New York's elevated railroad system, and an art patron who amassed a large personal collection and commissioned the famous sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to create his funerary monument. It is a rare stone version of Saint-Gaudens' masterpiece, Amor Caritas (Angel of Charity), his vision of the ethereal female, which he modeled repeatedly between 1880 and 1898. A heroic-sized (larger than life-size) bronze version won the Grand Prize at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900, cementing Saint-Gaudens' reputation as America's premier sculptor. Because of its popularity, some 20 smaller-scale versions were produced by Saint-Gaudens and sold through high-end retail outlets such as Tiffany & Co. Most of them are now in museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The face of the angel is modeled after the artist's longtime mistress and muse, Davida Johnson Clark. In the Hall Memorial version, the angel is set into a massive granite pedestal featuring a bas-relief portrait of Hall himself at the base.