Old Sloatsburg Cemetery - History

History

In 1781, as the Revolutionary War wound down, John Sloat was accidentally shot and killed near the family home by one of the sentries his father had hired. He was buried on the knoll that is now the family's section of the cemetery. His infant son John D. Sloat would eventually become the first Governor of California.

No other Sloats are known to have been buried with John until 1832. The cemetery remained strictly a Sloat family burial ground until 1852, when other members of the growing community joined them. A quarter-century later, in 1878, the Sloatsburg Cemetery Association was formed to manage the cemetery, no longer under family control. The next year it bought the 2.7-acre (1.1 ha) Hill Section from another local family and began selling individual gravesites rather than family plots.

The association transferred the original section back to William Sloat in 1896. A decade later, in 1906, and again in 1912, it bought two acres mores to the west from another family. Local funeral director Warren Waldron bought the last parcel, on the west side, and began dividing it into plots. The association made its last lot sale in 1936 and disbanded. Waldron's, and the cemetery's, last burial took place in 1949.

With no one to look after it, the cemetery reverted to the Town of Ramapo, which includes Sloatsburg. Some families continued to maintain their plots, but as a whole the cemetery fell into overgrown disrepair, with some headstones vandalized and even stolen. It is believed that at least 600 graves remain unmarked. After nearly a half-century of this, the village organized a community cleanup effort in the mid-90s and has kept it up ever since.