Please Help BHS Reset Tipped Stones at Forest Park Cemetery!
Contributions in any amount appreciated!
Checks may be dropped by the Society at 605 Brunswick Road, Eagle Mills during visiting hours or mailed to
Brunswick Historical Society
PO Box 1776, Cropseyville, NY 12052
Please write “Forest Park” on check memo line.
Forest Park holds the graves of veterans of the Civil War, the Spanish American War, and World Wars I and II. Burials also include about a dozen stillborn, unnamed infants, an unidentified homeless man, and the legs of one Mr. Graber and a Mrs. Green.
One of Forest Park’s most beautiful (but vandalized) monuments stands on the Hollister plot pictured here. Mr. Hollister, a partner in the Troy business Hollister & Lape Wholesale Grocers, was a member of Forest Park’s board of directors at the time of his death in 1905. Another Troy businessman, William H. Tann, who died in 1957, was the president of Lord & Tann, Inc., a popular Troy clothing retailer, and is buried with his family in the Kings Plot.
At rest in an unmarked grave in the Essex Plot is John Melville who was born in Scotland and memorialized in his 1946 obituary as the designer of the Freer Park golf course; he learned golf course design while employed as the greenskeeper at the Country Club of Troy.
About 30 tombstones have been knocked from their foundations by vandals, often obscuring the name inscriptions. One tipped stone is that erected for Rev. Stanton P. Allen (1849-1901) and his wife Annie E. Hunt (1849-1929). Rev. Allen was born in Petersburgh, served in the Civil War with the Massachusetts 1st Cavalry, was associated with local newspapers, The Whig and The Troy Times, and entered the Methodist ministry about 1892. Rev. Stanton also authored the book Down in Dixie. The side of the monument that can be read identifies the graves of Rev. Stanton‘s daughter and her husband who was Rev. William H. Edwards, pastor of the Eagle Mills Methodist Episcopal Church 1906-1910.
Historic markers are erected to encourage our appreciation of places, events, and people important to our community’s history as well as to motivate acts of preservation and spark additional study and research. Please join us as we endeavor to extend Forest Park the dignity a cemetery deserves, recognize the veterans buried there, and explore the life stories of those who lie in unmarked graves.
The Society is currently determining the cost of resetting the tombstones that have been tipped by vandals, and, based on an earlier estimate, expects this work will carry a price tag of several thousand dollars. Public contributions in any amount will be most appreciated and will expedite completion of the project before costs again increase.