On Thursday, May 23rd, the Roslyn Landmark Society welcomed Melanie Ross, a descendant of the Townsend family, to the historic Townsend Cemetery in East Hills for a personal tour of the burying ground. The cemetery, tucked behind North Flamingo Road on a parcel that straddles the boundary between the Town of North Hempstead and the Town of Oyster Bay, is the only burial ground in the Village of East Hills and one of the oldest in the region. Established in 1790, it served as the burying ground for 31 early English Quaker settlers across six families: Townsend, Jackson, Horsfield, Titus, Willis, and Boerem, and remained active for 136 years. Its notable connections run deep, with Townsend family descendants including Ezra Cornell, founder of Cornell University.
Howard Kroplick, who has been central to the cemetery's restoration story, shared that history with Ross during the visit, walking her through the Society's years of preservation work and accompanying her as she searched the headstones for her relatives. That restoration, made possible through a $10,000 grant from the Robert D.L. Gardiner Foundation, resulted in the repair of 16 headstones and 11 footstones, the uncovering of over 200 fragments, and the identification of 21 interment locations. Ross's visit is a reminder of why that work matters: the people buried here have living descendants, and a restored cemetery gives them somewhere to come home to.
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