{"nrhp_refnum":"13000627","name":"Oak Hill Cemetery","other_names":[],"category":"district","location":{"address":"W. German St.","address_restricted":false,"city":"Herkimer","county":"Herkimer County","state":"NY","lat":43.02135665700007,"lon":-75.0069375015912,"geom_source":"nps_gis"},"listed_date":"2013-08-23","is_nhl":false,"nhl_designated_date":null,"areas_of_significance":["Landscape Architecture","Social History"],"significance_levels":["local"],"summary":{"what_it_is":"Oak Hill Cemetery is a 5.6-acre rural community burial ground on the south side of NY 81, just west of the hamlet of Oak Hill in the town of Durham, Greene County, New York. It began as the DeWitt family burial ground on a late eighteenth-century farm, with burials from 1820.","why_significant":"The cemetery is significant for its association with the settlement and growth of Oak Hill and the town of Durham. It grew from the DeWitt family plot into a community cemetery holding many settlement families, industrialists, merchants and veterans. Its markers record the origins, intermarriages and ethnicity of residents from settlement to the mid-twentieth century, and its setting remains intact.","narrative":"Oak Hill Cemetery occupies 5.6 acres of rolling land on the south side of NY 81, just west of the Greene County hamlet of Oak Hill. It began as the family burial ground of Lucas and Deborah DeWitt, early settlers who died in 1820 and 1822 and were buried on a hilltop of their farm. It soon became a community cemetery. Roughly six hundred markers record more than one thousand burials, with the largest decade total, seventy-one, in the 1890s. Early stones are plain limestone slabs, while later nineteenth-century sections include large monuments and obelisks. Burials include members of the Utter, Plank, Tripp, Flower and Thorp families, veterans of several wars, and local industrialists, merchants and an artist, Olive Cheritree. The cemetery is listed for its link to the settlement and growth of Oak Hill and Durham and for the record it keeps of the community. It remains in use, set against farmland, oak trees and Catskill views, and retains a tool shed as a contributing building.","period_of_significance":"1820-1960","architect_builder":null,"architectural_style":null,"criteria":["A"],"status_note":"Still in active use for burials, mainly in the northwest section; it contains one contributing tool shed and one non-contributing modern shed.","vacant_flag":false,"machine_generated":true,"model":"claude-sonnet-5-5","prompt_version":"v1.0-2026-10-29","generated_at":"2026-10-29 02:50:47.726167-05","source_pdf":"https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorage/lz/electronic-records/rg-079/NPS_NY/11000274.pdf"},"photo":null,"district":null,"sources":{"nps_snapshot_date":"2026-05-22","nara_catalog":"https://catalog.archives.gov/id/75318011","wikipedia":null,"wikidata":null},"indexable":true,"url":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/new-york/herkimer-county/oak-hill-cemetery-13000627/"}