Irving founded a cemetery and then had it renamed for him

Irving founded a cemetery and had it renamed for him

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is a 90-acre burying ground in Sleepy Hollow, New York, and it is still an active, non-sectarian cemetery today. Rolling hills, old trees and the Pocantico River run through it. Roughly 47,000 people are buried on these grounds.

The cemetery began as a solution to a crowding problem. By the 1840s, the burying ground at the nearby Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow had run out of room. A new state law, the Rural Cemetery Act of 1847, allowed private companies to open commercial burial grounds for the first time. A group of local residents, led by the writer Washington Irving and a Revolutionary War veteran named Jacob Storm, moved fast. On October 29, 1849, they incorporated Tarrytown Cemetery on 39 acres just north of the old churchyard.

Irving wanted a better name from the beginning. He pushed for "Sleepy Hollow," the name of his own 1820 story about a headless horseman chasing a schoolteacher through these woods. The board turned him down at first. He got his way after his death: on February 9, 1865, the cemetery was renamed Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in his honor.

Irving did not live to see it. He died on November 28, 1859, and was buried here three days later, in the Irving family plot beside his mother. His nephew and literary assistant, Pierre Munroe Irving, later wrote that Washington had picked out that exact spot on a visit just days before his death. His gravestone is plain white marble, replaced more than once over the years after souvenir hunters chipped pieces off the earlier ones.

The ground kept growing after Irving died. Trustees added about 41 acres in 1886 and another 10 in 1890, reaching close to the 90 acres visible today. Stone-fronted family vaults were built into the older hillsides. Mausoleums and elaborate monuments later rose on the higher ground to the north, where Gilded Age families chose to be buried.

By the late 1800s, the cemetery had become a resting place for some of the richest families in America. Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-born steel magnate, is buried here. He came to the United States with his parents in 1848, a penniless boy, and died in 1919 one of the wealthiest men in the world.

The William Rockefeller Mausoleum built its own private cemetery behind a high fence at the cemetery's north end, tucked against the grounds of their estate, Kykuit. Banker Paul Warburg, union leader Samuel Gompers, and journalist Carl Schurz all ended up here too, among dozens of financiers, industrialists, and politicians of the era.

The Old Dutch Burying Ground next door is older still, dating to around 1640, more than two centuries before Tarrytown Cemetery existed at all. It holds Dutch tenant farmers and Revolutionary War soldiers. People sometimes confuse the two burial grounds, but they are separate, side by side. The mix-up matters for one reason: when Irving wrote "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" in 1820, the cemetery visitors walk through today did not exist yet. Ichabod Crane's fictional dash from the Headless Horseman ends at the old churchyard, not here.

The legend of Irving wandering the cemetery has outlasted the man who wrote it. Guides and locals have long claimed Irving wandered this very cemetery, reading names off gravestones for inspiration before he died. Nothing confirms that beyond the telling. Irving helped found the place and chose his own grave in it.

Through the 20th century, the cemetery kept filling in. Actress Alice Brady, cosmetics tycoon Elizabeth Arden, Bakelite inventor Leo Baekeland, and IBM's founding chairman Thomas John Watson, Sr. were all buried here across the decades. So was Nelson Rockefeller, vice president under Gerald Ford, who died in 1979. Hotelier Leona Helmsley and philanthropist Brooke Astor followed decades later, both buried in 2007.

In 2009, the National Register of Historic Places added Sleepy Hollow Cemetery to its list. The listing recognized the grounds and the hillside Receiving Vault, a stone structure built into the slope that once served as cold storage for bodies awaiting burial when the ground froze too hard to dig.

Westchester County's own property records describe the cemetery's 82 acres simply as land used for "community service," a single parcel carrying the address 540 North Broadway. The county does not record a construction date for any single structure on it, because the cemetery itself is the structure, built up acre by acre since 1849 rather than raised all at once.

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery remains a working, non-sectarian cemetery, kept running on burial fees and donations rather than public money. Roughly 100,000 visitors come through each fall, drawn as much by the Headless Horseman as by the famous names in the ground.