Follow North Elm Avenue — Route 22 — out of the village of Millerton and you pass a burying ground that has watched this corner of the Town of North East change for more than two centuries. Irondale Cemetery, named for the vanished industrial hamlet just up the road, holds roughly 2,800 recorded graves, according to the Find a Grave index.

Older Than the Village

A state historical marker at the cemetery, erected by the State Education Department in 1935, notes old stones dating to 1818 — decades before there was a Millerton at all. The village grew up only after the railroad arrived in 1851 (civil engineer Sidney Miller gave the place his name) and was not incorporated until 1875. The graveyard came first.

The Iron in Irondale

The cemetery's name preserves the memory of Irondale, the furnace community that once flanked what is now the Harlem Valley Rail Trail corridor. The Millerton Iron Company's plant was established there in 1854, and by 1882 it employed about 150 people, smelting local ore into car-wheel pig iron — cast iron destined for railroad car wheels — with a reported capacity of 12,000 tons by 1890. The hamlet had its own company-owned grist mill, a general store and a post office. Its one-room schoolhouse, built in 1858, taught the children of iron-working families until 1930; the Friends of the Irondale Schoolhouse moved and restored that building in 2013, and it now greets visitors at the Millerton trailhead of the rail trail. The cemetery is the quieter half of that same inheritance.

Names in the Ledger

In 1903, Lawrence Van Alstyne of Amenia published "Burying Grounds of Sharon, Connecticut, Amenia and North East, New York," an abstract of inscriptions from thirty local burial places, Irondale Cemetery among them. His register records Civil War veterans and family names that repeat across the town's history — Thompson, Wakeman, Shelden, Silvernail, Pitcher, Vosburgh, Hammond. Among the earliest generation listed is Samuel Hammond, born in 1790, who died in 1861, when the furnace era was near its height.

The cemetery remained a local landmark after the furnaces went cold. A 1910 photograph of Irondale Cemetery, credited to Lorin J. Eggleston, is preserved in the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, and Find a Grave memorials record burials continuing well into the twentieth century.

What the Record Doesn't Say

Records are sparse on the ground's beginnings: no published account we found names a founding date, its first burial, or any formal tie between the cemetery and the iron company whose name it shares. In recent years, the preservation energy documented in The Millerton News has centered on nearby Spencer's Corners Burying Ground and the Irondale Schoolhouse; we found no comparable published account of organized restoration work at Irondale Cemetery itself. If you have family buried there, or photographs and records that fill in the gaps, the town's history would be richer for them.

Sources: Historical Marker Database (hmdb.org); Find a Grave (Irondale Cemetery, Millerton NY); L. Van Alstyne, "Burying Grounds of Sharon, Connecticut, Amenia and North East, New York" (1903), via Dutchess County NYGenWeb; Village of Millerton history page (villageofmillerton-ny.gov); Town of North East photo history (townofnortheastny.gov); Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; Friends of the Irondale Schoolhouse (irondaleschoolhouse.org); The Millerton News.