Delhi News Bureau

MARGARETVILLE — There won't be a Memorial Day celebration in Delaware County's oldest cemetery, because the location of the ancient Dumond burial ground is still unknown.

A group of historians, archeologists and interested onlookers gathered on a tree-covered mound on Southside Road in Margaretville on Wednesday morning to search for evidence of the historic cemetery, but after digging for several hours, the search was called off, according to Ray Kole, the backhoe operator.

"The general consensus was that the cemetery is located somewhere in that area, but there were no traces of it at that location, so the archeologists told us to give up," Kole said.

Middletown Supervisor Len Utter said he was disappointed the dig wasn't successful.

"Supposedly some of my relatives were buried there, so I had a vested interest," Utter said.

Vashti Snyder, Middletown town historian, said the quest for the Dumond burial ground began in October when the former town historian, George Hendricks, told her Ed Duffy was excavating the land where the old cemetery was located.

Snyder said she was amazed there was a cemetery on Duffy's property and then even more astounded when she found out the oldest cemetery in the county might be destroyed.

When they contacted Duffy, he quit digging in the ground and Snyder and Ira Lawrence, the Margaretville village historian, began digging through old deeds, documents, maps and history books to gather information about the Dumond cemetery.

According to W.W. Munsell's History of Delaware County, "Probably the oldest burying place in the county, and surely the oldest in the town, is the old cemetery on the Dumond farm, across the river from Margaretville.

It was used by the early Dutch settlers, and they believed it to have been occupied long before by the half-breeds who preceded them.

"This place contains the graves of some of the children of the original settlers, but for years it has been entirely neglected. The bed of the proposed railroad is over it, and in grading, many of the bones of unknown dead were exhumed," Munsell wrote.

Snyder said Harmonous Dumond was the first settler in the town of Middletown. He and several other Dutch settlers arrived in 1763.

She said he had a young child die not long after the settlement began and that child was the first person to be buried in the Dumond Cemetery.

Hendricks and Snyder discovered four squared-off stones that were about two feet long and 12 to 18 inches wide.

Although the stones did not have any markings on them, they are the type of grave markers that were used at the time, Snyder said.

Lawrence said additional evidence that the cemetery was located on Duffy's land was gathered from Dumond family members; older town residents that remembered cutting through the cemetery on the way to school; and from an old newspaper article dated Oct. 14, 1949, which described the site in detail.

However, other references to the Dumond cemetery placed it in a different location. Snyder said both the Jay Gould map from 1868 and the Beers Atlas from 1869 showed the cemetery closer to the river.

Duffy said his family has owned the property for 70 years and there was never any indication there was a cemetery on the mound of land that abuts a gravel bank, but he was willing to allow the town to hire archeologists to do a dig.

Snyder obtained a $1,610 grant from the O'Connor Foundation that was matched by the town to hire the archeological team from the State University College at Binghamton.

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Patricia Breakey can be reached at (607) 746-2894 or at stardelhi@stny.rr.com.