Records of the Mount Hope Cemetery Association

Collection — Multiple Containers

Identifier: MSS 2020.0012

Staff Only

Scope and Contents

Collection comprises records of the Mount Hope Cemetery Association of Athens, NY dating from the founding of the Association in 1849. Included in the collection are purchase books with listings of plot owners alongside dates of purchase, as well as some documents concerning land owned by the cemetery and early records of Association Governance. Of particular note are two registers of burials in both Mount Hope Cemetery and Mount Hope Cemetery Annex listing the date of burial, name of the deceased, place of death, undertaker, and remarks as well as lot number they were interred in.

Dates

1849 - 2016

Biographical / Historical

The Mount Hope Cemetery Association was founded following the passage of an act for the incorporation of Cemetery Associations in 1847. Formed at the instigation of several prominent citizens in Athens, Mount Hope Cemetery recieved lands from Nathan Clark in an agreement in 1849, and the sale of lots commenced immediately. After exhausting available space in the 1880s, the Mount Hope Cemetery Annex was purchased in 1892 to create additional space and revenue for the Association. The sale of available lots largely ceased by the 1980s, and while the cemetery association remains active today their function is primarily relegated to that of maintenance of the existing graves.

Mount Hope Cemetery adjoins two historic burial grounds set aside in the earliest years of the Village of Athens. A Friends Burying Ground is adjacent to the northern section of the original Association Ground, and is bordered on the northeast by an earlier "Public Burying Ground" which largely comprises the congregants of the original Trinity Episcopal Church which stood down the hill easterly from the location in question. This Public Burying Ground may alternately be referred to as the Episcopal Ground, but this may be erroneous as some burials predate the formation of Trinity Church and the Village of Athens.