Volunteers swarm in after powerful storm batters ancient burial ground in Finger Lakes

The wind – up to 100 mph, according to the National Weather Service – cut a narrow but vicious path through Geneseo in Livingston County on the afternoon of June 16.

Accompanied by a brief but torrential downpour, it sped west to east, felling trees along the way, especially in Temple Hill Cemetery, an ancient burial ground along Route 20A on the village’s east side.

Huge and ancient firs and hardwoods were snapped off in the cemetery, their trunks and branches falling hard, embracing the graves they had long sheltered.

Two days after the microburst, Girl Scouts from Geneseo, Boy Scouts and other volunteers were at the cemetery. They ran among the gravestones to piles of fallen limbs and then dragged the limbs to dump trucks from the village’s department of public works.

“I’m just amazing at what they accomplished,” says Lee Ann Mumbach, the cemetery’s superintendent. “It’s inspiring to know how much support there is.”

Mumbach had been terribly discouraged in the immediate wake of the storm. It’s not just that she has come to love the cemetery since she became its superintendent in 2018. The cemetery is also her home, as she lives in a house on the property’s edge.

The cemetery was a burial ground even before it was officially founded in 1807 by the brothers James and William Wadsworth, the landowners who established what would become Geneseo. The brothers are buried there, as are 31 others with the last name of Wadsworth, according to the interment records.

But Temple Hill is certainly not just one family’s cemetery. It grew from 3 to 15 acres over time and there are multiple generations of many families. Among them are the graves of soldiers from the Revolutionary War and the wars thereafter.

“I love being here,” Mumbach says. “There’s so much history here. It’s like a park. People come and walk their dogs, walk with their kids.”

Trees, some of them probably 200 or more years old, are part of the cemetery’s draw, providing the shade and shadows that give a tranquil feeling to the setting.

Mumbach is most certainly a fan of trees, but she allows that they bring challenges as well as comfort. You have to mow around them in the spring and summer, rake up their leaves in the fall. Trees present work.

Now, with last Thursday’s weather event, the Temple Hill cemetery is facing tree-related challenges on a scale it has probably never faced before.

In clearing the branches and limbs that could be carted away, the Girl Scouts, their parents and other volunteers have done, and are doing, an astonishing job, Mumbach says.

There may be work to be done on damaged grave markers, though Mumbach is hopeful that most survived intact.

The biggest problems are presented by the 20 or so tall trees that were felled. They have weight; they have girth; they have length. “You walk around and you see it, and It’s just so much,” Mumbach says.

It will take more effort, and more equipment, to cut the trees up, to cart them away. Town and village crews will help, just as they have been helping, Mumbach says. There are volunteers with tree-removal experience standing by.

But the Temple Hill Cemetery Association, a non-profit institution, could use donations to assist with added expenses related to the cleanup.

Mumbach is confident that financial help will come, just as volunteers have shown up day after day. “It’s been an adventure,” she says, “but you realize what a wonderful community we live in.”

Among the dead

The Temple Hill Cemetery also contains the grave of General James S. Wadsworth, who was killed in the Civil War and his grandson, James W. Wadsworth Jr., who was a U.S. member of the House of Representatives and a U.S. senator. Carl Carmer, the folklorist and journalist who wrote often of New York state history

To help out

Donations to help with cleanup can be sent to Temple Hill Cemetery Association, Box 305, Geneseo, NY 14454. For more information email: templehill@frontiernet.net or call (585) 243-3400.

From his home in Geneseo, Livingston County, retired senior editor Jim Memmott, writes Remarkable Rochester, who we were, who we are. He can be reached at jmemmott@gannett.com or write Box 274, Geneseo, NY 14454

Editor's Note: The original version of this story said that Julia Delehanty, who became the first physician at SUNY Geneseo in 1957, was buried at Temple Hill. She is buried at St. Mary's Cemetery in Geneseo.

This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Temple Hill Cemetery in Geneseo battered by high winds