Clovesville Irish Catholic Cemetery


There is a small burial ground in Clovesville that harbors a forgotten immigrant history of our area. Known locally as the "Irish" or "Catholic" cemetery, it is located across Old Route 28 from the larger Clovesville Cemetery. Whether those interred wound up there by choice, or because they were denied admittance to the Protestant burial ground is not clear.

Roger Davis took the following headstone inventory of the Irish Cemetery in August of 2001. The cemetery was in bad shape then, and is even worse now, with the steep bank below it cut away by flood and excavator, leaving some of the graves in a precarious situation.

The annotations in parentheses after each headstone inscription were prepared by Ed Stewart in 2009 in an attempt to provide a little more information about these folks. Says Ed, "I suspect there may be many more people buried in this cemetery than we realize given the significant number of Irish around in the 1840-1880 censuses, and the high mortality rates of those years particularly among the tanneries and the quarries."

Many Irish immigrant men are known to have worked at the Clark Tannery in Dunraven around 1850, for example, and it can be assumed that the J. D. Elmore tannery, shown on the 1869 Beers Atlas map of Dunraven, employed Irish as well. The coming of the Ulster & Delaware Railroad in 1870 no doubt attracted a later tide of Irish laborers.

Interestingly, the Beers Atlas does not show either of the cemeteries that existed in Clovesville in 1869.

If you have any information about or are descended from these nearly forgotten people, or if you would like to help repair this cemetery, please email us at [email protected].

Historical Society of the Town of Middletown, Delaware County, New York.