Sparta cemetery is a short (30 minutes or so) walk from our house in Briarcliff Manor. Even though it’s short I don’t often walk it because from the house it’s all downhill (which is fine) and back it’s all uphill (which isnt). I’ve posted about it before (See: Sparta Cemetery Ossining NY), but the photographs in that post are in black and white; and were taken in winter. These show the cemeteryy in a rather different light. Also the last few times I’d been there the grass was rather short. Here the grass is longer and mixed in are a number of lovely wildflowers again giving the cemetery a rather different feel.

According to the Ossining Historic Cemeteries Conservancy:

Two hundred yards north of the intersection of Rte. 9 and Revolutionary Rd. lies a two-acre parcel of land where some of Ossining’s earliest history is buried. Sparta Cemetery is the oldest organized burial ground in Ossining, begun before the Revolutionary War. It is the final resting place of many of Ossining’s first settlers of English, Dutch, and French Huguenot heritage, Revolutionary War through World War II veterans, and the Old Leather Man. The oldest legible tombstone is that of five-year-old Sarah Ladew from 1764. The most recent interment was in 2007.

The cemetery originally served as the burial ground for the First Presbyterian Church of Mount Pleasant, the forerunner of the First Presbyterian Church of Ossining. The first church building was built in 1768 next to the burial ground. Both were located on the tenant farmland of Arnold Hunt, and the land was exempt from his land purchase (that is, set aside for the Church) by the Commissioners of Forfeiture in 1785. Although damaged in the Revolutionary War, the church building served its purpose until around 1800, when the congregation moved to a new church built in the village of Sing Sing. Moses Ward, one of Sing Sing’s founding fathers, had donated land for that purpose in Pleasant Square (the intersection of Highland, Croton, Main, and Broadway). Both Arnold Hunt and Moses Ward are buried in Sparta.

The broken column in the background indicates a life cut short, a memorial to the death of someone who died young or in the prime of life, before reaching old age.

Taken with a Sony RX-100 M3.