The one I missed. Pleasantville, All Souls Cemetery – Photography, Images and Cameras

Last month I did posts on three small cemeteries located in the same vicinity in Pleasantville, NY (See: Three Cemeteries in Pleasantville – Overview and Methodist Church; Three Cemeteries in Pleasantville – Palmer Family Plot; Three Cemeteries in Pleasantville – Banks Cemetery.

At the time I didn’t realize that there was another cemetery in Pleasantville: All Souls Cemetery. When I discovered that there was, off I went to check it out. It’s a lot larger than the other three. I tend to like older cemeteries and at first glance this seemed to be just another late 19th Century cemetery. It doesn’t have any celebrity interments and seemed to have little to commend it. However, as I walked around, I noticed a lot of interesting statuary and gravestones. I particularly liked the grotto mentioned below. All things considered a pleasant cemetery. I might come back in spring to see what it has in terms of flowering plants and shrubs.

According to Patrick Raftery:

The first Catholic Church in Pleasantville was built on the present site of Holy Innocents Church in 1876. At the time it was constructed, the church was not a part of a separate parish, but rather was administered from the Church of Saint Francis in Mount Kisco. At the urging of the pastor of Saint Francis, Father Michael Newman, Archbishop John McCloskey purchased a five-acre parcel on Marble Avenue from Letty J. Rosell on April 27, 1882, for use as a cemetery. Sadly, Father Newman died five years later at the age of 39. The Pleasantville church became a separate parish on July 1, 1894

The southeast section of the cemetery is reserved for deceased priests, nuns and brothers, whose graves a generally marked by simple crosses. An exception is the grave of Father Newman, whose interment is marked by a column acknowledging him as the founder of the cemetery. A grotto near the eastern fence of the cemetery notes that many of the nuns buried here had served at Saint Thomas School, an elementary school operated by the Dominican Sisters from 1897 to 1985 and attached to the Holy Innocents parish. Perhaps the most notable of the clergy and religious buried here is the Reverand Andrea Felix Morlion (190-1987), a native of Belgium who founded the International Pro Deo Union, the L’Università Pro Deo, and Libera Università Internatzionale degli Studi Sociali in Italy. Today [Note: the book was published in 2011] All Souls Cemetery is nearly full. Overshadowed as the favored final resting place for the area’s Roman Catholics by nearby Gate of Heaven Cemetery, it is still occasionally used by parishioners of Holy Innocents. (Patrick Raftery, “The Cemeteries of Westchester County, Volume II“. Westchester Historical Society, 2011.