Over Labor Day Weekend the Berne Historical Project at www.Bernehistory.org
sponsored the restoration of Pine Grove Cemetery in Berne, Albany Co.
Pictures are posted in the Berne Heritage Days Report on the website.

We are now trying to piece together a scenario for the origins of the
cemetery, but some of the evidence is confusing. Previously the earliest
known burial in the cemetery was 1804, a few years after the first Lutheran
Church in Berne was built about 1796 on the site halfway between Berne and
East Berne.

During the restoration, many stones were unearthed where they had been
covered for a century or more. Several of these stones were in German, and
the death dates were in the 18th Century with the earliest being 1777. The
surnames were of the families of settlers who had squatted on the adjoining
farms before Stephen Van Rensselaer III had his western manor lands surveyed
for the first time in 1786 and 1787. Clearly this had been a local burying
ground for about two decades before the church was built. The only nearby
house shown on the 1787 map was on the north side of the road, across from
where the church was built about a decade later.

The cemetery is on the south side of Helderberg Trial (State Route 443).
The 1787 Van Rensselaer survey map shows the road at the time in essentially
the same alignment as today's Helderberg Trail, running east / west through
Fox Creek Valley several hundred yards north of the Creek, so as to be well
above the flood plain. The site of the church is thought to have been in a
clearing near the highway. While the cemetery is narrow, it is surprisingly
deep, extending a long distance back towards Fox Creek, into the pine grove
which gives it its name.

The two mysteries are why the earliest graves are the farthest from the 1787
road and the nearest house across the road, and why all of the stones face
east, rather than north towards the road. In a deep, narrow lot, would one
not assume the stones would face the entrance on the road?

Harold Miller
Berne Historical Project www.bernehistory.org

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