Stillwater Cemetery

Stillwater Cemetery is a burial ground located in the village of Stillwater in Stillwater Township, Sussex County, New Jersey in the United States. The cemetery has been in use for over 260 years.

The earliest burials are recorded to have taken place in the 1740s following shortly after the first settlement of this area by Palatine Germans in the middle of the 18th century. These early German graves are noted for their intricately carved headstones and footstones which feature unique German funerary symbolism and in many instances, archaic German text.[1]

The cemetery was also the location of the first two buildings to house the Stillwater Presbyterian Church which in its early years was first a union church serving both the Lutheran and German Reformed faiths.[2][3] During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was known as the "Dutch Meeting House". It is presumed that the first structure used by this congregation was a rudimentary church made of logs, dating from as early as 1745 to 1750. Subsequently, a second structure built from local fieldstone was erected 1769-1771. This stone church structure was used by the congregations from 1771 to 1837 when it was abandoned for a Greek Revival frame structure built a quarter mile north from this site. The fieldstone structure was razed in 1847 and according to local tradition the stones from the building's walls were used to construct a stone wall along the cemetery's southern and western perimeter. A stone carved with the year "1771"—believed to be the original cornerstone for the church—was incorporated into the cemetery's gate.

Notable burials

Located within the cemetery are several dozen veterans of the French & Indian War, American Revolution, War of 1812, and American Civil War.

  • Casper Shafer (1712-1784), early pioneer, miller, member of Provincial Congress of New Jersey and New Jersey General Assembly (1776-1779)[3]
  • Maureen Gearhardt (d. 1972), former early 20th-century Coca-Cola girl
  • John George Wintermute (1711-1782), early pioneer of Stillwater[3][4]
  • Andrew Newbaker
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See also

References
  1. Veit, Richard F. "John Solomon Teetzel and the Anglo-German Gravestone Carving Tradition of 18th Century Northwestern New Jersey" in Markers XVII: Annual Journal of the Association for Gravestone Studies. (2000), 124-161.
  2. Chambers, Theodore Frelinghuysen. The Early Germans of New Jersey: Their History, Churches, and Genealogies. (Dover, New Jersey, Dover Printing Company, 1895), 631 ff.
  3. Schaeffer, Casper M.D. (and Johnson, William M.). Memoirs and Reminiscences: Together with Sketches of the Early History of Sussex County, New Jersey. (Hackensack, New Jersey: Privately Printed, 1907), passim.
  4. Wintermute, Jacob Perry. The Wintermute Family History. (Columbus, Ohio: The Champlin Press, 1900).

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