Brookside Cemetery

Story

Brookside Cemetery is a historical cemetery in Englewood, New Jersey.HistoryIt was started in May 1876, by a group of Englewood residents who purchased 6acre of land for a cemetery. The property sits on the East side of Engle Street adjacent to Tenafly, New Jersey. The cemetery was named for the brook running beside its eastern boundary. A chapel built with the local pink sandstone was erected on East Palisades Avenue and dedicated in March 1860. It was the first Presbyterian Church in Englewood and the first in Bergen County, New Jersey. It had a seating capacity of 200, and was expanded to accommodate 800 people in 1880. In 1887, the chapel was donated to the cemetery, and moved, stone by stone, to its present site near the entrance gate to the east side of the cemetery. When the chapel was moved, and reconstructed, the building was rotated and the entrance moved from the west side of the building to the east side. Mayor, and historian, Austin Nicholas Volk calls it: "One of the most beautiful cemeteries in Bergen County, New Jersey." Schuyler Warmflash refers to is as an "outdoor museum" and he wrote " change of attitude — which made sites devoted to the dead reassuringly pleasant to the living — is clearly manifest in Brookside Cemetery".