Dale Cemetery Heritage Trail

For more information about Historic Dale Cemetery, please visit the Ossining Historic Cemeteries Conservancy website for events and detailed history.

Dale Cemetery Heritage Trail Map (Download PDF)

Since 1851, Ossining’s history has been carved in the stone monuments at Dale. The Dale Cemetery Heritage Trail is made up of 37 signs: 34 grave markers which tell the story of the person or family buried there, plus 3 signs for cemetery structures. Along the Heritage Trail, you will find early settlers who worked the land, war veterans, and prominent families of the Village of Sing Sing, which was renamed Ossining in 1901. There are doctors, lawyers and politicians; merchants and shipbuilders; a baseball pitcher; a jazz guitarist; a famous anthropologist; and even an Arctic explorer.

The Dale Cemetery Association was founded by 12 leading members of Sing Sing Village to remedy “the absence of a proper Rural Cemetery for the final repose of the dead.” Dale Cemetery would compete with (and eventually surpass) the much smaller and older Sparta Cemetery at the south end of the Village. One of the trustees, Munson I. Lockwood, sold the land to the association, which then hired Howard Daniels, a landscape architect and proponent of the 19th-century Rural Cemetery movement. Paths follow the existing contours of the land, trees and shrubs are placed with care, and beautiful views abound. According to a speech given at the cemetery’s dedication on October 8, 1851, Dale’s combination of scenery, topography and “the fitness of the soil for the purposes of interment…” made it “one of the most beautiful and appropriate Rural Cemeteries in the State.”

“Here is a place, of which all may be proud; here all classes, sects and parties may drop their distinctions; here arrogance and envy, bigotry and intolerance, and all uncharitableness must be subdued by the consciousness, in all, of our mortality and need of mercy.”

From the 1851 dedication address

Dale was designed as much for its visitors as its permanent residents. Rural cemeteries were peaceful retreats from hectic urban centers, where family and friends could contemplate life and death through the lens of nature, and return to their lives not only comforted, but transformed by their contact with natural surroundings. Its founders also considered it “an important source of social welfare,” with beautiful sculptural art that would instill “a love of order and neatness” in villagers’ everyday lives.

The cemetery is organized in sections defined more by natural terrain and family groupings. The sections are denoted by letters or numbers, and are not in a contiguous order, reflecting the cemetery’s growth. The oldest is Section A, where you will find the grave of Samuel Youngs, Revolutionary War veteran; this grave was moved from the Old Dutch Burying Ground in Sleepy Hollow for the ceremonial purpose of first burial.

Like Youngs, monuments with pre-1851 death dates meant the bodies were likely moved here. Dale accepted the removal and re-interment of older graveyards and burial grounds, considered “unhealthy plague spots.” Family members buried earlier elsewhere were moved to the family plot, and in some cases, entire burial grounds were relocated, including from the First Baptist Church graveyard in the 1870s (Section R) and the Hunter family cemetery on State Street (Section E). Newer sections were added northward over the years; the newest planned section is 11D.

Dale Cemetery continues as a non-sectarian public cemetery. The Town of Ossining, New York, took ownership in 2004. In 2013 Dale Cemetery was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

Dale Cemetery Heritage Trail Map (Download PDF)

Below is a listing of the names and titles of the Heritage Trail markers, please download the Map here:

1. Chester Cornelius Hoff – Professional Baseball Pitcher
2. Charles Lamont Brieant, Jr. – Federal Judge
3. Henry L. Gourdine – The Dean of Hudson River Fisherman
4. Jesse A. Collyer, Jr. – Politician and Youth Sports Pioneer
5. Warren “Sonny” Sharrock – Jazz Guitar Pioneer
6. Bryan Johnson – A Legacy of Public Safety
7. Frances Brandreth Kane – First Lady of Civic Affairs
8. George Brandreth Borup – Arctic Explorer
9. Heuss Family – Artists of Cemetery Stone
10. Gen. Edwin A. McAlpin – Military and Business Leader
11. Benjamin Brandreth – Entrepreneur and Politician
12. Eleanor Brandreth Wunderlich – Botanical Artist and Civic Leader
13. The Foshay Family – Builders of Businesses and Faith
14. Dr. George Jackson Fisher – Physician and Historian
15. Dr. Franz Boas – The Father of American Anthropology
16. Gen. Aaron Ward – Congressman
17. James McCord – Revolutionary War Veteran
18. Catharine McCord Smith – Daughter of the Revolution
19. The Jenks Family – River Captains
20. Theodore Pine – Portrait Artist
21. Samuel Youngs – Revolutionary War Veteran
22. James Trowbridge – Revolutionary War Veteran
23. The O’Brien Family – A Family History Carved in Stone
24. The Collyer Family – Shipbuilders of the Hudson
25. Marlborough Churchill – Cadet, Schoolmaster and Citizen
26. The Hyatt Family – A Local Clan with Revolutionary Roots
27. The Holden Family – Building for the Future
28. George Titlar – Revolutionary War Veteran
29. John Thompson Hoffman – New York State Governor
30. The Receiving Tomb
31. Munson I. Lockwood – Prison Warden and Military Officer
32. The Moore Family – A Legacy of Faith
33. Capt. Elijah Hunter – Revolutionary War Spy
34. John Edward Holla – Fire Company Founder
35. The Pilat Family – A Landscape Legacy
36. Sing Sing Marble
37. The Superintendent’s Cottage

Read more about Historic Dale Cemetery on Wikipedia. And further research by Norman T. MacDonald, curator of the Ossining Historical Society.