Famous graves in Monroe County

April 04 , 2011 Filed in: Cemeteries | Shawnee | John Staples | 175th Anniversary | People


Part of a special anniversary section
published in the Pocono Record on April 1, 2011,
as Monroe County turned 175.


Gilbert Cemetery in Brodheadsville offers the Kresge Monument, created for Conrad Kresge and his family.

The monument portrays a man during the early years of the county. He is in the forest chopping wood as his young son sits nearby on a log. An Indian, emerging from the forest, is poised to place an arrow in the back of the young boy.

The boy's death by the Indian arrow may have inspired the questionably true event of the last Indian killed in the Effort area. After killing the boy, the American Indian, as the story goes, was tied behind a wagon and his body dragged up and down a mountain.

At Shawnee Presbyterian Cemetery in Shawnee-on-Delaware, Nicholas Depuy and Benjamin Van Campen, both soldiers in the Revolutionary War, are buried. Depuy was the founder of Shawnee-on-Delaware. The cemetery is also the burial place of noted artist Cullen Yates, who lived in the village from 1923 until his death in 1945, and of world-renowned big-band leader and composer Fred Waring.

Stroudsburg Cemetery on Dreher Avenue near Main Street is the host to the graves of J. Summerfield Staples, a Stroudsburg resident who served as Abraham Lincoln's representative recruit in the Civil War, and William D. Walton, who served in the medical corps during the Civil War.

Hollinshead Cemetery, which dates back to Stroudsburg's first days, is the resting place for many of the town's early inhabitants.

In that cemetery, on Dreher Avenue, just past Interstate 80, are the graves of John and Elizabeth Stroud, son and daughter-in-law of Jacob Stroud, Stroudsburg's founder. Also laid to rest there are Dr. James Hollinshead, one of the earliest doctors in the area, and his wife, Sarah Stroud Hollinshead, daughter of Jacob Stroud.

Dansbury Cemetery on lower Main Street in Stroudsburg is where the grave of Jacob Stroud — soldier, member of the Pennsylvania General Assembly and apprentice to Nicholas Depuy of Shawnee-on-Delaware — can be found. It is also the burial site of his son Daniel Stroud, who lived in Stroud Mansion on Main Street, Stroudsburg, which is now home to Monroe County Historical Association.

At Laurelwood Cemetery, just off Bryant Street in South Stroudsburg, is A. Mitchell Palmer of Stroudsburg. Palmer served as U.S. attorney general from 1919-21 under President Woodrow Wilson. His term was brought to a crashing halt in the wake of the now-infamous Palmer Raids, also known as the Red Scare, which trampled the rights of thousands of immigrants.

An unknown soldier of the Revolutionary War is buried at Hungry Hill Cemetery in Pocono Pines, at a site along the route of Sullivan's March.

Source: Pocono Record archives