Monfort Cemetery
Town of North Hempstead, Nassau County, New York
Marker Inscription
GRAVESITES OF EARLY SETTLERS BURIED FROM 1737 TO 1892 INCLUDING THE ONDERDONK, HEGEMAN, DODGE, RAPELJE AND SCHENCK FAMILIES.
Erected by William G. Pomeroy Foundation
The Story
This burial ground holds the graves of some of the families who put down the earliest European roots on western Long Island, with interments spanning more than 150 years from 1737 to 1892. Names like Onderdonk, Rapelje, and Schenck echo the Dutch heritage of the region, whose settlers farmed the fields and shorelines of what became North Hempstead long before it was part of Nassau County. A small country cemetery like this one is a quiet ledger of a colonial-era community, recording generations of the same households through independence, nationhood, and the growth of the young republic.
Why it matters
Family graveyards like this preserve the human record of America's colonial Dutch and English settlement, grounding the sweeping story of early Long Island in the names of the people who actually lived and died there.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Long before Nassau County had a name, the western end of Long Island was a patchwork of Dutch and English farmsteads gathered around tidal creeks, salt meadows, and the rich glacial soil that made this stretch of the island good for growing things. The oldest graves in this ground date to the 1730s, a time when the area was still a scattering of family farms rather than towns, and when the memory of New Netherland — the Dutch colony that once governed this coast — was only a couple of generations old.
The span carved into this memorial, from the 1730s to the 1890s, is remarkable in itself. It reaches from the reign of a distant British king, across the Revolution, through the birth of the United States, and into a country crisscrossed by railroads and telegraph wires. A single burial ground held families through all of it.
This was farm country for most of that time. The households remembered here worked the land while the wider world changed around them — the colonies became a nation, the nation grew west, and Long Island slowly shifted from a place of independent farms toward the suburbs it would one day become.
People & events
The names gathered here — Onderdonk, Hegeman, Dodge, Rapelje, and Schenck — are a roll call of the region's early settlement. Several of them carry the unmistakable ring of the area's Dutch roots; Rapelje and Schenck in particular echo families whose presence on this coast reached back into the colonial era.
These were not famous people in the way a general or a president is famous. They were the households that actually cleared fields, raised barns, and buried their own on the family ground rather than in a distant churchyard. A country cemetery like this one was, in effect, a community's ledger — recording births and deaths in stone across generations of the same surnames.
What you are seeing is continuity. To find the same handful of family names appearing in a burial ground over a century and a half is to see a settled community that stayed put, intermarried, and passed its land down. The individual stories are mostly quiet ones, but together they trace the long human thread of a place putting down roots and holding them.
Its place in the American story
The grand story of early America is usually told through capitals and battlefields, but it was built on thousands of small settled communities exactly like this one — Dutch and English families farming a corner of the coast and quietly becoming Americans over the course of a few generations.
Western Long Island holds a particular piece of that story. It was part of the old Dutch orbit of New Netherland before it was English, and before it was American, and burial grounds like this preserve the surnames that carry that layered heritage forward. They are the ground-level evidence of how a colonial frontier became a rooted society.
Sites like this matter because they keep the national story honest and human. Behind the sweeping words about settlement and independence were real households, and here their names endure — a reminder that the country grew one family, one farm, one generation at a time.
If you visit
A small country burial ground rewards a slow, quiet visit. Come expecting stillness rather than spectacle: weathered stones, old family names, and the particular hush that gathers around a place that has been remembering people for a very long time.
Look for the surnames the marker names, and let the dates do their work — set the earliest against the latest and you are holding more than 150 years in a single glance. Older stones may be worn thin or hard to read; treat them gently and never try to make a rubbing without permission, as fragile markers are easily damaged.
On a Long Island road trip this makes a good grounding stop between busier destinations — a few reflective minutes that connect the modern suburb around you to the farm families who were here first. Be respectful of the site and any neighbors, keep to the paths, and leave it exactly as you found it.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Onderdonk family
- · Hegeman family
- · Dodge family
- · Rapelje family
- · Schenck family
Themes & tags
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