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 Please reply to [log in to unmask] rather than this address.