In late August, Carol Johnson, coordinator for the Haviland-Heidgerd Historical Collection (HHHC) at the Elting Memorial Library in New Paltz, received an interesting phone call. It was from representatives at Historic Huguenot Street (HHS,) the organization managing the assets of the oldest incorporated street in America, a few blocks down the road in the Village of New Paltz. “They asked me to come down and look at some old headstones they found in a barn that they were renovating on Huguenot Street, behind the Jean Hasbrouck House,” recalled Johnson.
At first, representatives of the HHS believed that the old headstones belonged to the New Paltz Rural Cemetery (NPRC), located on Plains Road. Curious and always one who enjoys delving into New Paltz’s past, Johnson said she’d come down and take a look. “The headstones were in pieces,” she explained, pointing to a mosaic of washed-out fragments of tombstones where some of the lettering and decorative elements were nearly impossible to decipher. She and Eddie Moran, the head of tours at HHS, worked together to put the pieces back together, like some giant Day of the Dead jigsaw puzzle. The two historians were able to resurrect at least six of the gravestones, three of whom ended up belonging to Revolutionary War soldiers from New Paltz.
“There were so many questions,” said Johnson, as she arranged the photos to show one inordinately large headstone, the size of a door, that featured ornate engravings with weeping willow trees billowing over the name of a husband and wife who died within three days of each other: Cornelius Dubois (1750-1816) and Gertrude Dubois (1747-1816.) “Where did these tombstones come from? Why were they in this old barn? How long had they been there? Whom did they belong to?”
Names or partial names that were still legible, along with various designs and the shapes of the broken stones, helped Moran and Johnson assemble them back to life in memorial. Once Johnson had names and dates, she went back to HHHC and began going through records of the New Paltz Rural Cemetery, the book Old Gravestones of Ulster County by J. Wilson Poucher and Byron Terwilliger, various obituaries and news notes she could find that about the person or persons who were listed on the transitory tombstones.
Eventually, things began to take a greater historical shape. “The New Paltz Rural Cemetery was established in 1861,” said Johnson. It was founded during the Civil War when there was suddenly a great need for interment space, and the fields along the river with a view of the Shawangunk Ridge proved to be a popular resting site for fallen bodies of local soldiers, as well as entire families. As the body count grew from the Civil War and then the First World War, the Spanish Flu and other large-scale lethal events, the need for gravesites increased.
At the same time, the society was moving from agriculturally centered to industrialized, and that led to people’s large farms being broken up and sold as they moved toward industry positions rather than dairy and fruit farming. To that end, Johnson noted, “These small, rural, family burial grounds that were on people’s farms began to be moved.” She found various clippings in old newspapers that mentioned the superintendent from NPRC exhuming the remains and tombstones of New Paltz families like the DuBoises and Hasbroucks and moving them to the public cemetery, where the families paid for family plots.
Clippings from 1898 and 1899 in the New Paltz Independent mentioned the removal of headstones from properties to the Rural Cemetery, where new monuments were being built, typically in the form of large obelisks encircled by smaller headstones: a graveyard fashion at the time. “The names of the buried family members would be listed on the obelisk, and then there’d be small stones around it,” she said, showing a picture of one of these monuments.
In the book Old Gravestones of Ulster County, there is a mention of the Hasbroucks having purchased a family plot at the NPRC and having had their older graves being reinterred. A list of names of those who were buried on the family’s land (near Guilford Schoolhouse and Albany Post Road) included a note that said, “Many had already been moved.”
One of the people listed as buried on the Hasbrouck land, but not in the new family plot at the rural cemetery, was Johannis Eckert, 1746-1840. This was the name on one of the tombstones that Johnson and Moran pieced back together. When they looked him up, they realized that at the time of his death he was 93 years old and had been a soldier in the Revolutionary War for the Third Ulster Regiment. Why was he buried at the Hasbrouck family burial ground and why did his tombstone end up in a barn on Huguenot Street?
Searching through various archives, Johnson found Eckert’s Last Will and Testament, in which he declared that upon his death, “Louis and Joseph Hasbrouck,” his trusted friends, should be the “executor[s] of his estate.” His name does not appear on the Hasbroucks’ newer family plot at the NPRC, however. Maybe “blood is thicker than water” entered the picture and Eckert was not quite hoisted out, but moved to a shadowy spot indoors. No one knows, but as Johnson points out, “He was a soldier and deserves to get recognition and have his tombstone laid next to our other veterans of war.”
It turns out the Cornelius DuBois, who is listed on his family’s obelisk at the NPRC, was also a Revolutionary War soldier. “I don’t know why his tombstone is in the barn,” said Johnson. “I wonder if it isn’t because it’s so large and beautiful that someone didn’t know what to do with it, but didn’t want to throw it out.” For whatever reason – heartsick, or they caught the same virus or both – Cornelius and Gertrude died within three days of each other, according to their large and ornately carved tombstone, which is indeed a work of art.
It turns out that Cornelius, who inherited upwards of 1,000 acres of land from his family that ran along the Plattekill Creek and towards the Shawangunk Ridge in Gardiner, served as a quartermaster in the Fourth Regiment, run by Jonathan Hasbrouck, his brother-in-law, who is interred at Washington’s Headquarters in Newburgh. “His wife was Gertrude Bruyn, the granddaughter of the woman for whom Gertrude’s Nose [an iconic viewpoint on the Shawangunk Ridge] was named. And he was a quartermaster in the Revolutionary War.” A quartermaster is someone who is responsible to provide the regiment with whatever materials it needs — food, tents, ammunition, guns — and the job would require someone who had the means to obtain these items.
In an effort to figure out where the other tombstones had been taken from, Johnson and Moran, and eventually Hudson Valley One, went trekking through the brambles of overgrown and obscured family plots in the woods to see which stones were there and which ones were missing, according to the book of old graves in Ulster County. Several stones still lay in their original plots, on old family farms that have long since been sold off and subdivided. There was a third tombstone that belonged to a Revolutionary War soldier, James Miller.
“We’re in the process of getting estimates to have [the tombstones] epoxied and preserved,” said Johnson. Once they’ve done that, the historians would like to appeal to various organizations and associations that work to ensure that veterans’ gravesites are established and cared for and their occupants properly laid to rest. “They deserve to get a flag every year on their tombstones and be part of the Wreaths across America for their service to our country,” said Johnson. “I also think that this makes a great educational story, to talk about Cornelius and his role in the Revolutionary War, and for these individuals’ descendants. This is someone’s ancestry.”
Moran noted that the recording of burial sites and graveyards is one area where New Paltz history is lacking, compared to other areas, such as histories of structures and buildings and of course the ancestry of the original Huguenot Patentees, where it flourishes. He also noted that many of the old family farm burial grounds were “integrated,” and included enslaved individuals who worked for the larger farms. “That history is incredibly important.”
There are more questions than answers in this historical puzzle, but one thing that Johnson and Moran did know was that it was Halloween night. The annual parade had been rerouted to end on Historic Huguenot Street, where hundreds if not thousands of costumed individuals would be frolicking, and the newly assembled tombstones were still lying about on wooden palettes under a tarp on the side of the street. “We had to move them, and move them quick!” Johnson said.
The tombstones have now been moved and are being protected. The three Revolutionary War veterans will be recognized on Veterans’ Day.