Monday, 29 January 2018

THE SLEEPY HOLLOW VILLAGE.

The Sleepy Hollow is a village located on the East bank of the Hudson River, about 48 km/30mi North of New York City, in the town of Mount Pleasant, in Westchester County, New York.
The village is known to many via "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," a short story about the local area and its infamous specter, the Headless Horseman, written by Washington Irving, who lived in the area and is buried in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery. Owing to this story, as well as the village roots in early American folklore, Sleepy Hollow is considered to be one of the most haunted places in the world.
Numerous notable world people are buried in the burying ground of about 36 hectares (90acres). The churchyard of the Old Dutch Church, the colonial-era church that was a setting for the short story, is contiguous with but separated from the burying ground.
The Old Dutch Church is the second oldest church and the 15th oldest building in the state of new York, renovated after an 1837 fire. The17th-century stone church is located on the East side of Albany Post Road, just North of the downtown village. A wooded area to the South East buffers the church from the residential area in that direction. The building itself is a rectangular structure with thick field-stone walls. In its original bell, a verse from Romans 8:31 is engraved, "If God is for us, who can be against us?" and the initials of Frederick Philipse in it. He was the architect and financier of the church.
Approximately 100 meters/300 ft to the South of the church is the body of water (mill pond) at Philips'Burg Manor House. The Manor (farm house) dates from 1693, when Frederick Philipse was granted 21,000 hectares / 52,000 acres along the Hudson River by the British Crown. A facility was built at the confluence of the Pocantico and Hudson Rivers as a provisioning for the family due to their Atlantic trading and as headquarters for a worldwide shipping operation. For more than 30 years, he and his wife and later his son, shipped hundreds of African men, women, and children as slaves across the Atlantic. By the mid 18th century, the family had one of the largest slave-holdings in the colonial North.
The original land that would become Sleepy Hollow village was first bought from Adriaen van der Donck, a landholder in New Netherland, a 17th-century colony of the Dutch Republic before the English takeover in 1664. At the outbreak of the American Civil War, the Philipses supported the British, and their landholdings were seized and auctioned off.
The cemetery in the village is the final resting place of numerous famous figures, including Washington Irving, the author of the short story "the legend of Sleepy Hollow." Among them we find the following:
-Viola Allen (October 27, 1867-May 9,1948) an American stage actress who played leading roles in Shakespeare and other plays.
-John Dustin Archbold (July 26, 1848-December 6,1916) one of the United States' earliest oil refiners. He rose rapidly at John Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company handling many of the complex secret negotiations over the years.
-Elizabeth Arden (Florence Nightingale Graham) (December 31,1878-October 18,1966), a Canadian-born American businesswoman who built a cosmetics empire in the United States. She was the sole owner, and at the peak of her carrier, one of the wealthiest women in the world.
The Rockefeller family estate (Kykuit), whose grounds have a common boundary or frontier with the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, contains the private Rockefeller cemetery.


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