Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

Washington Irving died in 1859 and was buried on a wooded hillside in the cemetery that now bears the name he made famous. But the cemetery and the old Dutch churchyard beside it are different places. The burial ground that appears in Irving’s 1820 story was part of the churchyard; the rural cemetery was incorporated decades later, in 1849, as Tarrytown Cemetery. Its founders planned a new kind of burial ground, with winding lanes and natural scenery where families could visit and remember their dead.