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Hundreds of people in Jonesville Cemetery were once buried somewhere else.
Jonesville: The Cemetery That Moved
Twice buried, once moved
In October 1864, 252 corpses from Union Grove Cemetery were dug up and moved to Jonesville Cemetery, gravestones included. And decades later, another 50 followed.
Some of plots that were moved actually go as far back as 1799, such as the grave of Jemima Hubbs, the oldest headstone which is dated January 10, 1799. Some of the oldest monuments on this hill were also lifted out of Union and set down in Jonesville.
While there are no documented ghost stories about Jonesville Cemetery, in 2009, volunteers lifting a half-buried 1870 stone for nine-month-old Katie Vincent found another marker lying face-down beneath it: David Hagermore, an infant who died in 1849.
Fifteen years before Jonesville existed.
No one could say why a Union Grove-era marker was under a later child’s grave.
A cemetery built to look old
Jonesville was designed to feel ancient on purpose. Civil engineer Burton Arnold Thomas laid it out in 1864 as a rural cemetery, the Victorian idea of a graveyard as a park: hills, trees, roads that bend so you never quite see the end of them.
His plan (see below) still hangs in the Clifton Park-Halfmoon Library.
Where it is
Ushers and Longkill roads, Clifton Park.
The cemetery made the National Register of Historic Places in 2014.
Visitors will also find James Jones, the hotelkeeper the hamlet is named for. The Jonesville Hotel stood across from the country store until it burned in 1915. He is still here.
Not far off is Robert W. Van Patten, called the “Father of Clifton Park” for the suburbs he helped build in the twentieth century.
The Garnseys and the Kennedys are here too, names that still label the roads outside the fence.
Where did the other 50 come from?
Around 1958, 50 more remains, from two family cemeteries, were also moved into Jonesville. New York State bought space at Jonesville for remains from those two small private family cemeteries. Those stones are at the front of the cemetery, near Ushers Road.
The grounds hold more than 100 veterans. Among them are George Washington Cornell and David H. Dater, friends from Jonesville who served in Company F of the 77th New York. Both died of typhoid on in 1862, aboard the steamship Daniel Webster, on the way home. Cornell was 21. Dater was 20.
Their deaths came two years before Jonesville opened.
The Town of Clifton Park lists a tour of Jonesville Cemetery for October 16, 2026, on Longkill Road. See you there!
Countdown to Halloween
Halloween is our favorite holiday