Geneva’s First Burying Ground
(From February 1990 Historical Society Newsletter )
If you died in Geneva in the 1790s you would almost certainly be buried in the plot where Trinity Church now stands. A pioneer hamlet at that time had no undertaking, no embalming, and few able-bodied men to do the digging and carrying. Burial was usually on the day after death. Transportation of corpses (except perhaps by boat) was nearly impossible. When Bishop John Henry Hobart died at Auburn in 1830, his body was packed in ice and shipped to New York City by canal boat for burial at Trinity Church, but in the 1790s, the Erie Canal had not yet been dug.
No official records were kept in these frontier settlements – there were no officials to keep them and no churches or clergy. There were no carvers to make headstones, though there might be a few headboards to serve as markers.
But deaths undoubtedly occurred in Geneva, though unrecorded. When Dr. Alexander Coventry paid his first visit here in 1791, he found it full of “Pennsylvania banditti” who were idle, dissipated, and in poor health. Some of them probably died and were laid in [the future site of Trinity Church] not too far from where their cabins and taverns were scattered.
The first Trinity Church
Epidemics swept the settlement regularly until a water supply from the White Springs Farm was piped down in 1796. In 1795 Dr. Coventry returned from a trip to find that an epidemic of dysentery was raging in Geneva; there were several corpses still unburied; a young doctor who had recently moved to Geneva had died, and so had the wife of Dr. Adams, an older physician.
An enslaved couple lived and worked at Coventry’s farm across the lake, near where Rose Hill now stands, and Bet died in 1793. Her coffin was made by a former neighbor who had moved to Geneva, and her funeral the next morning was attended by that man and by the man who operated the ferry at that outlet, who, Dr. Coventry wrote, were “the only strangers at the funeral.” There is no record of burials at Rose Hill, and it may be that she was buried in Geneva where her coffin was made. Though Dr. Coventry uses the word “funeral,” there was no clergyman in town, but Dr. Adams had used The Book of Common Prayer at a funeral in Canandaigua in 1790 and may have done so, occasionally, in Geneva.
Dr. Adams lived till about 1804 and the Nicholases, who bought his place at the White Springs Farm, testified in the 1880s that he was buried “where Trinity Church now stands” and where his wife had already been buried in 1795. It was not until about 1797 that the Pulteney Street Cemetery was begun, so that his old burial plot may have served sometimes until the first wooden Trinity Church was built in 1809-10 on top of many graves. Those bodies were re-interred in a large box under the center of the church when the present stone building was begun in 1842. In 1884, when the wing for the parish house was constructed, more graves were found and the remains were buried behind the church.
There were no further burials for nearly a century, until Bishop Coxe and his wife and children were buried behind the enlarged chancel of the church. Now that a columbarium has been built in the chapel, there will be twentieth and twenty-first centuries remains to join those of the 1790s and 1890s; may they rest in peace, and many light perpetual shine upon them.
Read more about Geneva’s cemeteries