Oak Hill Cemetery

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.