The Cornwallville Cemetery
The Full Story
Cornwallville Cemetery, Town of Durham, Greene County The Cornwallville Cemetery is a site of considerable importance to the historic identity of this rural Greene County, New York community, which sprang up in the hilly terrain of the Town of Durham in the shadow of the Catskill Mountains in the later eighteenth century. First used for burials in 1824, the cemetery serves as the final resting place for many of this community’s preeminent figures, among them the hamlet’s first settler, Captain Daniel Cornwall, a veteran of the American Revolution who arrived there from Connecticut with his family in 1788 and established a pioneer homestead. The Cornwallville cemetery long served as the setting for a Methodist house of worship, a wood-frame building which served an organization that had been established in the community a few years earlier, in 1821. Long a central religious and social institution for many of the hamlet’s denizens, the church fell into disuse and was later relocated to the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, New York, where it remains as part of the organization’s historic building collection. The nominated cemetery, while it enjoys significance in relation to the collection of funerary art maintained there, nevertheless derives its principal significance from its direct association with the early settlement history of the hamlet of 10 Cornwallville; the various individuals and their families who are interred there collectively helped guide the development of Cornwallville, as well as influencing its social, civic and religious affairs, from the time of its settlement beginning in the later eighteenth century. The Cornwallville Cemetery is being nominated in association with National Register of Historic Places Criterion A, in the area of Exploration/Settlement, given the considerable number of prominent settlement period individuals that are interred there. It is additionally being nominated in association with Criterion C, in the area of Art, for the representative collection of funerary art contained within. It remains a significant and salient touchstone to the hamlet of Cornwallville’s history and the various individuals and families which shaped it.
https://parks.ny.gov/documents/newsroom/165thHPStateReviewBoardMeetingNotes.pdf
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THE FARMERS MUSEUM
https://www.farmersmuseum.org/cornwallville-church/
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