History
The history of the cemetery begins shortly after 1850, at this time the old burying ground on Green and Front Streets was being overrun with weeds and was described as being in an unsanitary condition. The result of this was that the Common Council resolved on 2 July 1856 to use the grounds of the old Hospital Farm on Nott Terrace, as a 38-acre (150,000 m2) public cemetery. On 16 June 1857, Mayor Benjamin V S Vedder appointed a committee to oversee the work.
In order to gain access off one of the main streets in Schenectady, Nott Terrace, Dr Eliphalet Nott, the President of Union College donated an avenue from Nott Terrace into the grounds. Later in 1863, two pieces of land were purchased from the college creating what is now known as Vale Park. The entrance on State Street was a donation from the First Reformed Church in 1867.The cemetery was planned by Burton Thomas to be a rural cemetery by laying out many winding paths and planting over 1,000 trees, even the Cowhorn Creek was dammed to provide a lake within the grounds. The cemetery has since grown in size and covers approximately 100 acres (0.40 km2) and holds some 33 000 people.
Read more about this topic: Vale Cemetery And Vale Park
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)
“The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)