ICHABOD’S GRAVE, NEW SPRINGVILLE

SON Rise Charismatic Interfaith Church can be found on Staten Island’s main north-south cross-island local street, Richmond Avenue, which roars from Port Richmond all the way to Raritan Bay, opposite Willowbrook Park just south of Signs Road. It’s surrounded by Washington Cemetery, which is sometimes overgrown with brush, sometimes clear. Originally the Asbury Methodist Church, this building’s walls are as old as 1849, with the interior remodeled in 1878. The church was named for Bishop Francis Asbury (1745-1816), an itinerant preacher who became America’s first Methodist Episcopal bishop. An even earlier church called the North End Church stood on this site.

The historic church is surrounded on three sides by Washington Cemetery, whose first interments were in 1804. Different sections of the cemetery are in various states of upkeep or down-keep. To visit its most famous resident, enter through this gate, walk straight ahead to the back of the graveyard, and turn left.

Before you is the gravesite of Col. Ichabod Crane, a military man who was an acquaintance of author Washington Irving. He is buried here with his wife and brother as well as Juan, a Native American boy who accompanied Crane after he was stationed in Oregon. Crane later learned (to his horror, by all accounts) that the protagonist of Irving’s famed 1820 story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow bore his name.

Repeatedly vandalized over the years, the Crane grave marker was restored anew in 2004 by the Joseph G. Hall and Sons Monument Company of Pleasant Plains, Staten Island.

Col. Crane’s house stood nearby in New Springville until the 1980s, when it was torn down and a warehouse built in its place. There is a street near the cemetery called Sleepy Hollow Road.

Elsewhere in the cemetery, which apparently is the churchyard of Asbury Methodist combined with the New Springville Cemetery which once served the town in general, are a few metallic monuments, most likely made of zinc. Tap them — they’re hollow. Most graves in the cemetery read like a Staten Island street gazetteer. Similar metal monuments can be found in Brooklyn/Queens’ Most Holy trinity Cemetery, where they are quite numerous.

More from Bulls Head and New Springville

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3/6/24