Historian’s Report September 2025:
I’m working in Old Delhi now and will continue until the weather gets too cold.
I borrowed the Town copy of the CETA project to compare my findings with what they learned in 1981. CETA was a project done by students to document all the cemeteries in Delaware County. I don’t know if other counties also had cemeteries documented. The book is large - about 15” x21”. It contains information on all the cemeteries in the Town of Delhi, including Old Delhi, that the students were able to find, including some that are inaccessible now. Each cemetery is mapped for burials, names, dates, type of stone and comments, like “wife of”, or “son of”. I took the CETA book to the Delaware County Planning Board and they copied the whole book for me, plus a flash drive. I hope someone can copy the flash drive so both the Town and the Village have a copy. It’s a large, floppy book and difficult to use in the field so I’d like to keep it in the cage on the rolling cart.
The CETA project for the Court St cemetery (Old Delhi) found 26 names on the gravestones, plus about 10 unknowns. Some names are spelled incorrectly and only a fraction of the gravestones were included. There was a typo on the one of the pages that became immediately apparent when I did a test of the coordinates for a gravestone I know well, Allen Knapp. His marker is a small marble obelisk on the south east corner (Court St) near the sign. When the original document was made the first few columns are spaced 2 lines down from the top. The next few columns have single line spacing from the top for the remaining columns. A straight edge must be used to match the info on the left side of the page with the correct info on the right, slanting it by 1 row for each name. Once I figured it out, I was able to compensate for the error.
The other document I work with is from the dcnyhistory.org website. Unfortunately, the mistakes made by the CETA project have been transferred to dcnyhistory site. The dcnyhistory project was able to find and identify more gravestones than CETA, a total of 46. I don’t have a working copy of this document but I can access it on my phone. In addition, I’ve found gravestones that weren’t discovered by either CETA or dcnyhistory. I haven’t found a document yet stating how many burials there were originally. Tuesday, Sept 2 Dale and Tina Utter and I reset 3 gravestones, Mary Leet, Asahel A. Phelps and Alfred Byron Curtis, who died at 7 weeks old. The baby’s gravestone was the one we had to move to get the equipment in to remove the trees. I was confident I would remember exactly where the grave was. We started digging out a small trench to reset the gravestone and found a perfectly intact, very old, very small glass bottle. We surmised Alfred’s family had brought flowers to his grave and left the small bottle. The bottle ensured we were digging in the correct spot of the grave. We returned all the glass fragments we unearthed to the holes we dug when resetting all the gravestones. I don’t keep any artifacts I find while working as historian so I gave the glass bottle to Mayor Gearhart. I also found a photo online of a cotton and wool coverlet made by Asahel Amora Phelps, 1841, in the Colonial Williamsburg Collection, Accession number 2006.609.11.
My plan is to place garden stakes at each gravestone I want to work on to positively identify or reset. I combined the CETA list with the dcnyhistory list. Last week I was able to positively ID 4 more known gravestones and discovered 2 gravestones that aren’t on either list. I had a purchase order to buy a rake, a pail for stones and a trowel to start resetting small gravestones. I will ask (or I have already asked) Daren Evans for several partial pails of crusher run gravel for filling in around the gravestone as it’s being reset. My friend, Cindy Tennant, from Walton, has volunteered to work with me once a week, when possible. I can’t yet estimate how long the restoration will take but I think several years.
My winter project will be to research the streets and roads in the Village and Town of Delhi. I hope to learn how they were named.
Marianne Greenfield, Historian
Many of you know where Phoebe Lane is. Some people drive past it or on it several times a week. The Public Safety Building is at the end of Phoebe Lane. A very pretty name for a street and it’s the only street in the Village of Delhi named for a woman. I believe the street was built circa 1920-1940 but I don’t know the exact date. Maggie Hoag Road is the only road in the Town of Delhi named for a woman, that I’m aware of, but that’s another story. 