Frenchtown's "City of the Dead" (I Can Show You Around)

CEMETERY – The Frenchtown Cemetery began as the Prevost family graveyard. Paul Prevost was the founder of Frenchtown. In 1810 the first body was buried there. It had belonged to Paul's wife, Jeanne Patry M. Prevost, was laid to rest there. After Paul died and the family acreage was being sold off, his son Lewis M. Prevost set aside some land around the family graves and formed the Frenchtown Cemetery Association in 1857.

By year's end, it had received its first customers, Isaac F. Tomson (1835-1857) and then Jacob Rounsavell (1817-1857). More land was added as it became available.

The stone fence across the front of the cemetery was installed in 1880, when the place contained 547 graves, not counting the early graves of the Prevost family. Since 1857, the mortal remains of almost 5,800 people have been buried there.

The only frame structure on the premises is the tool house, constructed there in 1897 by John L. Slack for $261. The main avenue was macadamized in 1901.

In 1933 Clarence Fargo wrote, in a mix of boosterism and poetry, “Our 'Silent City of the Dead' is one of the most beautiful cemeteries to be found in localities of this size. With its old shade, its well-kept plots, its beautiful situation, its serenity, one perhaps unconsciously, is caused to feel that when my little day is done and I am numbered with my fathers, here I would sleep in peace and be at rest.” Depending on how tired you are, he makes you want to lie down. For $950 you can lie there forever!

(Or you can take my Cemetery Tour for $15. Email me at RickEpstein@yahoo.com for details.)

Among the most prominent monuments are those in memory of Pvt. Garret Roberson, who died at the Battle of Gaines Mills in 1862; Robert Rittenhouse, who was “lost at sea” in 1935 when the SS Havana ran aground on a reef in the Bahamas; and of Pvt. William Finney Jr. and his fellow victims of the spinal meningitis outbreak at Jefferson Barracks in Missouri in 1907.

Gerald “Jerry” Case has been superintendent of the cemetery since 1983.

From "Rick's Frenchtown Encyclopedia"