Jonesville Cemetery Jonesville, New York

Text courtesy of the National Register of Historic Places, a program of the National Parks Service. Minor transcription errors or changes in formatting may have occurred; please see the Nomination Form PDF for official text. Some information may have become outdated since the property was nominated for the Register.

Jonesville Cemetery, located in the Town of Clifton Park, is an important example of rural Picturesque cemetery design in Saratoga County, New York. Burton A. Thomas, a land surveyor, civil engineer and landscape architect, was responsible for developing the ca. 1864 design for the cemetery. A native of Rensselaer County, New York, Thomas is credited with the design and layout of 25 cemeteries, and for many years served as the superintendent and surveyor for the Albany Rural Cemetery in Menands, New York, established ca. 1844 (NRHP-listed 1979). While a seemingly modest example of the type, Jonesville Cemetery nevertheless displays salient features consistent with the rural cemetery type, as expressed in its combination of undulating and flat topography, naturalistic landscape features, and serpentine circulation system. These elements provided what was deemed a suitable environment in which to honor the deceased and were conceived to invoke in visitors a sublime and contemplative atmosphere. Thomas used the existing topography of the site to great advantage, with the central hill forming the dominant topographic feature and dictating the layout of the graves and the circulation system. Although built in the mid-1860s the cemetery nevertheless incorporates any number of stones which predate its establishment, these marking graves that were subsequently relocated here from earlier burial yards. Jonesville Cemetery is being nominated in association with National Register of Historic Places Criterion C, in the areas of Art and Landscape Design, at the local significance level. It is being nominated as a designed landscape, in the rural Picturesque cemetery taste, and as a representative example of the work of Burton A. Thomas; it is additionally being nominated for the large collection of funerary art maintained therein, some of which predates the construction of the cemetery.