Townsend family headstones, some predating nation, to be relocated to Oyster Bay cemetery

Years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence and before Robert Townsend worked undercover in George Washington’s spy ring, his grandparents were buried in a family graveyard in Jericho.

Prominent early settlers in Oyster Bay, the Townsend family used the cemetery as a final resting place for members of its genealogical tree, including many who predated the formation of the United States. Gravestones from that site were displaced by construction in the mid-1900s, historians said, leaving their bodies buried under the intersection of Routes 106 and 107.

"When you get to that roundabout," said William Townsend Perks, an ancestor of the Townsend family who kept the gravestones safe for years, "you’re driving over my ancestors."

About a half-dozen Townsend headstones will be relocated to Fort Hill Cemetery in Oyster Bay, where other members of the family are buried. It's part of a town effort to preserve the family’s history and its connection to the formation of the country. The gravestones include the markers of Jacob Townsend and Phebe  Seaman Townsend, the grandparents of Robert Townsend.

"The plan is to restore and clean up the stones and then to reunite the family markers all together in the same cemetery," Oyster Bay Supervisor Joseph Saladino said. "This plays an important part in our community’s history."

Interspersed cemeteries

Cemeteries were once interspersed throughout Long Island, in backyards and other locations that have since been lost to the region’s expansion and construction. When New York State built clover leaf interchanges on Long Island in the 1950s and 1960s, the grave sites of Townsend ancestors were paved over. The stones, said John Hammond, Oyster Bay’s town historian, were placed against a tree on a nearby property.

Years later, Perks said the owner of that property, who had held onto the centuries-old stones, was planning on moving and needed to get rid of them.

That’s when he and his son volunteered to take the stones from a field of poison ivy in Jericho. He said it was important to preserve his family’s — and the country’s — history.

"If there wasn’t a Jacob Townsend, there would be no Robert Townsend," said Perks, the former treasurer of the Townsend Society of America.

In the years that followed, Perks kept the stones on his family’s property in Centerport while he tried to find a way to give the headstones a new home. Now, they’ll rest in the tiny plot off Simcoe Street in Oyster Bay.

The collection of stones include markers for another Jacob Townsend, who died in 1773; Benjamin and Frost Townsend, who were both 2 when they died in 1770; and Hanna Seamen, who died in 1772. Other stones are damaged and will require restoration.

'Resilience and refusal' 

The Townsend family were early settlers in Oyster Bay. After fleeing restrictions on religious freedom in Queens, Henry Townsend in 1661 was granted land in Oyster Bay to establish a milling operation in the town. While there, Henry Townsend invited George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, to preach — an act defying the rules that pushed the family to Long Island.

Those early actions crafted a lineage of nonconformity, said Harriet Gerard Clark, executive director of the Raynham Hall Museum, the 18th century home of Samuel Townsend, the father of Robert Townsend.

Robert Townsend became an agent in Washington’s Culper Spy Ring, which gave critical information about British occupation to Washington while British Maj. John Graves Simcoe used the Townsends’ home as a headquarters.

"It’s a story of resilience and refusal to go along," Clark said. "We admire those things that the Townsends believed in, which were largely based on the notion of independence."