Historic Graveyards and Cemeteries – Visiting a Museum: The Unique, Unusual, Obscure and Historical

French Burying Ground

Patrolman Ray Woods Drive

New Milford, NJ 07646

https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/1652365/french-burying-ground

https://www.nj.gov/dca/njht/funded/sitedetails/FrenchHuguenotCemeteryandHuguenotChurch.shtml

https://patch.com/new-jersey/newmilford-nj/the-french-burying-ground

Open: Dawn to Dusk

Admission: Free, the gates are open across from the baseball field.

My review on TripAdvisor:

The sign for the French Burying Ground

The historic marker in the front of the cemetery

The French Burying Ground

The French Ground is a small historic cemetery once sat next to the French Church and the David Demarest House, that has since been moved to the Bergen County Historical Society site.

The Demarest House at the Bergen County Historical Society

The graves of members of the Bogert, Demarest and Christi families

The History of the French Burying Ground:

(from the New Jersey Historic Trust)

Thought to be oldest cemetery in Bergen County, the French Huguenot-Demarest Cemetery was established in 1677 as the final resting place for prominent French Huguenot and Dutch settlers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. David Demarest purchased approximately 2,000 acres of land along the east bank of the Hackensack River from Native Americans in 1677 to establish a colony of French-Huguenots.

The cemetery is all that remains of the original French-Huguenot colony and has more than four dozen descendants of Demarest family buried on site. The Borough of New Milford acquired the property in 2018 and has been working closely with the New Milford Historic Preservation Commission to plan for its restoration and future interpretation. 

The French Burying site sign

The cemetery (technically a graveyard since there was a church once here) is the final resting place of many of Bergen Counties Revolutionary War veterans as well as many prominent families including the Demarest, the Bogert and the Christie families. These were some of the founding families of Bergen County.

The graves of the prominent Bogert and Van Saun families

The cemetery has a quiet elegance about it with the many different styles of tombstones and the sheer history of these families and their contributions to the creation of our country.

The historical marker notes the cemetery was first used in 1677 after an agreement with the Native Americans

The back part of the cemetery

Members of the Bogert family

Members of the prominent Bogert family

Members of the prominent Demarest family with Revolutionary War veteran Reverend John Demarest

Members of the prominent Demarest family

The historic marker of the original church site

There are many of the veterans of the Revolutionary War buried at the site some of which survived the battles and went on to have productive lives in their communities.

Veteran John Van Norden

Veteran Uzal Meeker

Veteran John Demarest

Veteran Cornelius Bogert

Veteran Willimpie Bogart Demarest

The grave of Patriot Abraham Demarest

This cemetery, like the rest of the small cemeteries and graveyards that dot Bergen County show the history and significance of these families contributions of the residents of early Bergen County and how they shaped the founding of this country.

Video tour of the Cemetery:

Perry Cemetery-Harrington Park Historical Society

Old Hook Road

Harrington Park, NJ 07640

(201)768-2615

http://www.harringtonparkhistoricalsociety.com/

https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=241777

Open: Dusk to Dawn

Admission: Free

My review on TripAdvisor:

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g46493-d33215615-Reviews-Perry_Cemetery-Harrington_Park_New_Jersey.html

The historical significance of for the cemetery

The Perry family cemetery is a small family plot in Harrington Park, NJ and example of a time when families still buried their loved ones on property that family’s thought would be there for generations. Many generations of the family are buried here showing the family’s love of this land but like too many tiny cemeteries throughout Bergen County have been lost in time by the family buried there.

Today it sits quiet and respectful and somewhat over grown. Nature now surrounds it.

The Perry Cemetery History:

(From the Harrington Park Historical Society)

The Perry Cemetery is a small family burial ground located on what was the farm of David Perry (1809-1871). The Old Burying Ground cemetery is part of the land apportioned to Garret Huybertsen Blauvelt, son of one of the original sixteen grantees of the Tappan Patent approved by the Governor of New York in 1686. Although there are believed to be earlier ones, the first known burial was in 1722 and the last in 1905.

The Perry Family Cemetery sits quietly on a stretch of Old Hook Road

(From the Harrington Park Historical Society)

The Perry Cemetery is situated in the Borough of Harrington Park on Old Hook Road, east of Bogert’s Mill Road opposite the United Water Company building. David Perry had devised by his will, signed on July 18,1868 that: “the burying ground where the same now is, westerly of my dwelling house, of the use of 40’ square, I give unto all my children to be kept by them and their posterity as a place of burial forever.”

The Perry family tree of loved ones buried at the cemetery

(From the Historical Marker Database)

When David wrote his will, his great-grandson Perry Cole (1866-1867) already had been buried in the small plot. By the end of 1871, six members of the Perry Family had been laid to rest within yards of the family house. The last burial at the cemetery was that of David’s great-grandson, Claude Yeomans (1887-1940). There are a total of twelve people interred at the Perry Cemetery.

The untimely death of many members of David’s family is a reminder of the struggles and uncertainties that people of that period routinely endured. The property remained in the Perry Family until the 1920s when it was purchased by the Hackensack Water Company to become part of the Oradell Reservoir. The graves are laid out in four even rows facing East and the markers are either marble or granite.

The Perry Family tree starting with the marriage of David Perry to Catherine Blauvelt