HISTORY OF CHERRY VALLEY NEW YORK
What's up in the Historian's office.

We are currently in the process of GPS mapping all of the outlying cemeteries in the town of Cherry Valley. There are many small family plots out there in the hedgerows and woods and at the end of lonely dirt roads. These small cemeteries have a significant impact on family genealogists and historians who want to know who lived and who died here, but are not buried in the Cherry Valley Cemetery located on Alden Street.
With that in mind, we (the volunteers and I) are also on a mission to find the original Cherry Valley Cemetery or "oid burying ground" which was in use from 1739 - 1760. We have a pretty good idea where it was and hopefully we will find it soon.
Many of our early settlers (including Campbell, Clyde, Clark, Roseboom, Gault, Lindsay, Dunlap, Sillworth and more we aren't even aware of) are purportedly buried here. All that would remain of these graves are the indentions of the coffins and some small upright stones, probably without markings.
The Cherry Valley Cemetery on Alden Street is just inside of where Fort Alden's barracks and churchyard was. Early settlers started burying about 1760 after the church was moved from its original place near the residence of Samuel Dunlop.
After the Revolution, inhabitants used the cemetery again and expanded the grounds to encompass more of the fort, including the area where the storehouses, munitions dump, stable yards and officers quarters were (remember, the fort housed 278 men at one time). As the village expanded, all the area where the fort once stood became houses, and at one time (1860's) part of this area was the grounds on which the Cherry Valley Academy stood.

These two examples are what we are looking for. These photos were taken at an old cemetery on a back road in Maine,
I have always been interested in the old heritage Rose Gardens that were so prevalent here in the 1880's but now have been destroyed. Susan Roseboom Belcher made it her life work to import roses from China and all over the world in an era where it was unthinkable for a woman to do that sort of thing. Her home was called "Roselawn" and it is currently the Limestone Mansion B&B owned by Loretta and Wolfgang Welter located on Main Street.
Three years ago, the Cherry Valley Historical Association received a very generous grant to reestablish one of those rose gardens at the rear of the Cherry Valley Museum. This is an ongoing project. Every Thursday evening from 6pm on during the month of June and the first half of July, we are out busying ourselves with gardening. Sometimes we are out collecting species roses for the garden as there are a few collectors in the area who will share species with us and for whom we are very grateful. We are mainly concentrating on species and heritage roses, Rosa Rugosa and Galethia types. Much of our stock dates from before 1880 and a few well before 800AD. We also have four fine examples of our native Cherry Valley Rose and the George Washington rose. Both were prevalent here in the 1700's and all but destroyed by former policies of roadside spraying to kill vegetation. There are just a few species of these two varieties left in Cherry Valley and we are eternally grateful to Jean Lamouret for bringing our attention to them and her kind donation of several plants.
Please join us in the garden if you have a chance. It is fun!

As always, interviews of our older citizens and their views are ongoing. If you have stories about Cherry Valley, please let us know.
If you have old pictures you are willing to share, plase mail or bring them to the office for scanning. We return all your original documents. We make two copies. One is kept in the historians office and the other is given to the Cherry Valley Historical Association for their files.



Return