By REBECCA SHALOMOFF
The cemetery, more than 200 years old, contains the graves of many settlers of Rockaway and the Five Towns.
For the past few decades, this cemetery has been vandalized and completely neglected, family members said. Three-quarters of the stones have been knocked over and about half a dozen have been defiled with graffiti. A broken, rusted fence off Rockaway Turnpike serves as the entrance way, they said. The grounds are riddled with litter and broken pipes, broken headstones and concrete pieces, making it impossible to know, in several areas, who is buried where, they added. Unkempt shrubs hide the presence of a handful of graves. The south cemetery yard borders the Long Island Rail Road tracks with an incomplete and severely damaged fence separating the properties. The older stones, dating back to the 1830s, are sunken in and damaged.
Scott Rumph of East Northport has many generations of relatives buried in the cemetery. About three years ago, he began to visit it often in an effort to record his family's genealogy. He was so engrossed in the project that he began recording the dates of other families buried in the cemetery's 200 plots. He has recorded well over half of the information of the deceased, but is unable to decipher the names and dates of the other graves, piece together the broken, scattered stones or locate missing headstones.
"It's terrible," he said. "Some of my ancestor's graves are knocked over. I saw a guy hitting golf balls into the cemetery. I got so depressed that I stopped going. It's a shame. Not just for respecting people of the past, but for information that is being lost."
Only in 1880 did New York State require birth/date registration to be recorded, which most likely took some time to take effect. Cemeteries, therefore, are a valuable source of determining personal and historic information. The complete record of burial in the Lawrence Methodist Cemetery, however, cannot be located.
The cemetery has been the private property of the changing owners of the church at 150 Rockaway Turnpike. Founded in 1831 as McKendre's Chapel and Lawrence's only Christian house of worship to date, the church was rebuilt during the Rev. John J. Forist's pastorate as the Lawrence Methodist Church in 1907 after a fire destroyed the building. In 1980, the building and cemetery properties, located directly next to the church and across the street behind a medical building, was sold to the Community Bible Church for $35,000 under the obligation that the cemetery be maintained as the deed states: "Holes in cemetery to be filled, all stones to be raised to upright position, fences to be repaired or replaced, underbrush to be removed, grass to be moved as often as necessary and shrubbery trimmed, graffiti to be removed from stones and monuments, and suitable landscaping to be done."
The Community Bible Church, not living up to the agreement, sold the building and cemetery in 1995 to its present owners, Alianza Cristiana Y Misionera (Christian Alliance Missionary), a predominantly Hispanic evangelical congregation. The congregation is bound to the same agreement of maintaining the cemetery, but has no financial means to do so. The church building itself has become dilapidated and is also in desperate need of repair.
The owners of the cemetery could not be reached for comment.
Roy Meserole of Meserole Funeral Home in Inwood said that maintaining a cemetery "is a big job." Because the cemetery has been neglected over the years, "People that would have been buried there chose not to," he said.
Only not-for-profit cemetery corporations or associations are eligible to receive financial assistance from government agencies. According to Edward J. Hand, senior investigator of the State of New York Division of Cemeteries, "Town Law 291 requires that townships assume control and maintenance of abandoned public cemeteries. If the property is privately-owned, then the town is exempt from any obligation of maintenance."
Mr. Meserole said that while the church is liable for groundskeeping on the land, under cemetery law, restoring broken headstones is the responsibility of the property's owner.
Virginia Hicks of Inwood fondly remembers her Sunday tradition of visiting the cemetery with her grandmother after church services. She carried a wicker basket filled with bouquets of flowers and a trowel. Each week since Ms. Hicks was a young girl until she was married, she would plant lilies of the valley and lilacs in front of the gravestones of her great-grandparents and the other, by now, 50 relatives buried in the cemetery - the Pearsalls, Abrams, Motts and Hicks. For the past 20 years, it's been too painful for Ms. Hicks to visit more than four times a year because of the cemetery's horrendous condition.
"I think it's a disgrace," she said. "It would break my grandmother's heart if she came back to see it."
Elyse Craft of Commack has about 30 relatives buried in the cemetery. "My childhood was filled with stories from my father and grandfather of this historic area of Nassau County that served as hometown to my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and the many generations before them," she said. "The Craft family has been in this area since William Craft in 1683."
Ms. Craft is deeply saddened by the state of the cemetery. She has made arrangements to have her family stones repaired but wants to do more. She proposed to enact a private fund to assist in the maintenance and restoration of the cemetery.
Anyone interested in contributing to the restoration of this historic property can write to: Lawrence Cemetery Restoration Project, c/o Elyse Craft, 4 Palmer Lane, Commack, NY 11725.
