‘Giving Names to Souls Forgotten No Longer’

On a quiet, wooded stretch near the northern terminus of Call Hollow Road in Thiells, there’s a small gravel lot that’s easy to miss if you’re not looking out for it.

At the edge of the woods a small, blue rectangular marker reads “The Old Letchworth Village Cemetery 1914-1967” fastened to a smaller “No Dumping” sign.

Down a short gravel trail leading to a hillside grove, a visitor finds hundreds of graves with T-shaped numbered markers — the remains of residents who died at the nearby state facility for the developmentally disabled and were buried anonymously.

The numbered plots are a reminder of a dark period of overcrowded institutions, and a time when it was not uncommon for families to protect their privacy because of the stigma attached to having a relative with mental illness.

Letchworth Village, with a sprawling campus along Willow Grove Road that stretched into both Haverstraw and Stony Point, opened in 1911 as a self-contained “village” for people with special needs.

Built to hold some 2,500 residents, its population swelled to more than 4,000 in the 1940s. The state started moving away from facilities like Letchworth and toward deinstitutionalization in the 1960s. Letchworth sent its last residents to group homes in 1996.

“People would literally drop folks off on the ground and leave,” John Murphy, a now-retired Rockland county legislator and longtime advocate for people with disabilities, told The Journal News in 2008. “This was a time back in those days when these conditions were something people were afraid of and the public was frightened by.”

In 2008, efforts to comb through old records to identify the cemetery’s dead led to the installation of a granite monument inscribed with the names of 910 men, women and children, in the order they died.

The monument’s inscription reads: “Those Who Shall Not Be Forgotten” and also bears the names of six Letchworth residents buried “on the mountain,” referring to nearby Cheesecote Mountain. The monument stands next to a granite bench inscribed with “Giving Names to Souls Forgotten No Longer.”

Also in 2008, a new state law allowed loved ones to replace the metal grave markers with proper headstones, and those can be found occasionally dotting the cemetery.

Over the years the cemetery has been scarred by vandalism and illegally dumped refuse, although none was visible on a visit in early January.

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