Heady Burial Ground in New Castle, New York

About

Get directions 114 Spring Valley Road
New Castle, New York, USA

Coordinates: 41.20187, -73.84056
Cemetery ID:

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About these numbers These percentages indicate the number of Find a Grave memorials that have a grave photo or GPS coordinates. We don't know the total number of burials in a cemetery, so we cannot calculate a percentage of those with memorials, photos or GPS coordinates.

Photos

5 open photo requests.

The burial ground is on private land and access can me made by walking through a pedestrian steel gate off the driveway to the estate and through a wooded area. Roadside parking on the narrow roadway is difficult.

The Heady Burying Ground is an abandoned cemetery on Spring Valley Road in New Castle, Westchester County, NY. The burying ground is about an acre square and is the final resting place for the Heady family. At one time they farmed the surrounding 100 acres. Lazerus Heady was one of six illegitimate children of Thomas Hadden, a white slave owner from Scarsdale, and an African-American named Rose.
In Thomas Hadden's will of 1761 he left instructions that his children by Rose be taught a trade, learn to read and be given 25 pounds to start their lives and be "exempted from slavery." Thomas Hadden was married, and had a family by his wife, but he made sure he took care of his children by Rose.
Lazerus (with no surname) is listed in the 1790 New Castle census as the head of a family of ten free blacks. The Heady family was Methodist and held services in their house on Spring Valley road before the Methodist Episcopal church was built. (The Ossining Historical Society Museum and the New Castle Historical Society have more information on the Heady family).
The FindaGrave listing of burials is of the headstones and their epitaphs as they appeared in the 1960's when they were copied by Irene Scase Summerville. Today, many of these epitaphs are unreadable in this overgrown burying ground.