Volunteers restoring LI's abandoned cemeteries

Lindsay Henry is crouching before a weathered gravestone, moss entrenched in its cracks and grooves, trying to decipher the details of the person buried in the spot beneath his feet. Taking his hand out of his pocket, he wipes away some dirt, squints his eyes and tries to put the pieces together.

"Ruth Higbie, wife of Aaron Higbie, 35 years, five months and two days old, died May 22, 1791," he reads, followed by a wide-eyed "wow." Next to the marker is a larger, marble headstone also bearing the faded etching of the Higbie name. He thinks it says "Aaron," but the rest of the information is undecipherable. "It used to be readable," Henry laments with a shake of his head.

Cemeteries throughout Long Island that once were abandoned or neglected are being cared for and restored by volunteer groups and town workers who are discovering previously hidden sources of historical information.

Henry, who is a Babylon town board member, is also on the board of the nonprofit Babylon Cemetery Association, which oversees this landscape of graves off Deer Park Avenue known as Babylon Cemetery.

The cemetery is divided into two parts. The larger section - about an acre and a half - is run through family trusts, and the smaller section - about an acre - is considered "abandoned." The latter section, with graves dating back hundreds of years, had become overgrown and run-down until the association convinced the town several years ago to assist in cleaning it up. This month the town board adopted a resolution devoting $5,000 in each of the next two years for the maintenance of the abandoned portion.

Under state law, towns must take over the care of abandoned cemeteries.

"There's no doubt that there's all kinds of historic value to our rural cemeteries," Henry said.

In the larger section, the gravestones are a virtual Who's Who of area history, many of the surnames adorning streets not only in Babylon but in other Long Island communities as well: Higbie, Sammis, Weeks, Southard, Foster. In the abandoned section, graves without famous names tell a history, too - plots of war soldiers, sea captains and children who died in disease epidemics. Some stones have fallen over, others have been vandalized. Some are simple granite slabs, slowly disintegrating.

Until the town stepped in, "the whole place was going to wrack and ruin," association member Gail Askoff said. "You couldn't even walk in there."

The town is considering adding another abandoned cemetery to its care. Town historian Tom Smith has been exploring a patch of land off Colonial Springs Road in Wheatley Heights. The graves, all believed to belong to members of the Conklin family, are surrounded by private property.

"We believe it's abandoned," Smith said, adding that efforts are under way to find Conklin family members who could claim ownership.

Buried there is Jacob Conklin, who, according to legend, was a pirate on Captain Kidd's ship, and is believed to have been one of the earliest settlers in the area, building a home in the 1600s. His grandson Nathaniel moved to the area that is now Babylon village, and his visiting mother took one look at the gin mills nearby and remarked that it resembled Babylon, the Biblical hotbed of sin. Nathaniel told her no, it was the new Babylon. The name stuck.

The cemetery is small - Smith estimates it's about 100 feet by 60 feet with 36 gravestones - but loaded with the kind of information historians rely on to piece together a town's history, however fragmented time may leave it.

"It's like a big jigsaw puzzle," Smith said. "Every once in a while you get a corner, but you never get the whole picture."

Smith is excited at the prospect of the town's taking over care of the cemetery. "It's going to be a gem," he said.

Richard Fishman, director of the state Division of Cemeteries, had no estimate of how many abandoned or neglected cemeteries there are in the state. Last year the state turned over 15 to towns, he said, and the number has been growing each year.

He said there are 6,000 operating cemeteries in the state, 1,850 of which are public or nonprofit and regulated by the office. The remainder are religious or municipal cemeteries, he said.

Volunteer groups who took on the task of caring for old cemeteries have had trouble keeping up financially, Fishman said, since there are no new burials to bring in money. Because of the expense, some municipalities are hesitant to take on the work. "People think you just cut the grass, but that's not all that's involved," he said, pointing to the expense of preserving and straightening stones.

Since last summer, Mary Cascone, Babylon's historical archivist, has been taking inventory of the town's cemeteries. She hopes to have a report completed by the fall and to begin working with the town on restoration efforts.

Many of the neglected or abandoned cemeteries have historical significance, she said, such as the Brewster and Green-Bunn cemeteries in Copiague, where American Indian and Civil War soldier graves were discovered decades ago. The sites became historic landmarks in 1994.

"If we're going to start any kind of cleanup project, we have to know what we're dealing with," Cascone said. "A lot of places are so vandalized the stones are no longer there. Sometimes it's a matter of physically getting out there and looking under the grass and the bushes to find them."

And some sites are landlocked by private property or so remote that access is difficult, she said. Development on Long Island has hindered efforts to find and preserve these spaces.

"Unfortunately, you end up with these sacred places next to industrial areas and railroad tracks," she said. "So it's easy to overlook them. And that's why we want to find them."