East Hampton Town has gotten a $5,600 grant from the Preservation League of New York State to fund a cultural resource survey of cemeteries.
The town's surviving burying grounds, cemeteries, and gravesites preserve monuments that memorialize members of the community, leaving unique records of the dead that are characteristic of their time. Collectively, the sites are a group of historical landscapes that preserve headstones as well as walls and fences, plantings, and pathways that survive largely intact from the 18th and 19th centuries.
The town will hire the Burying Ground Preservation Group to conduct a survey to document historical burying grounds, cemeteries, and gravesites, including Native American burial grounds, with the goal of listing all cemeteries of historical significance within the town on the National Register of Historic Places.
The multiple property documentation form for these historically and culturally significant sites will enable the town to prioritize future restoration work, according to a statement issued from Town Hall on Tuesday. "We are pleased and grateful to receive this Preserve New York grant to help us achieve full protection of our historic gravesites and burying grounds, which are such an important historic cultural resource," Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said in the statement.
The Preserve New York program is a partnership between the New York State Council on the Arts and the Preservation League. The Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation has provided additional money to support nonprofit projects in Nassau and Suffolk Counties.
