The Woodstock Artists Cemetery began with a father seeking a place to bury his teenage son. Since 1934, the hillside burial ground has become a record of the people who helped shape the town.

The Woodstock Memorial Society, the nonprofit that runs the cemetery off Mountain View Avenue, has about 50 burial plots available. In October 2022, the society joined neighbors to buy 1.13 acres for $170,000 to expand the cemetery.

“It’s a treasure,” said Oscar Buitrago, the society’s president, “a vital and tranquil place of remembrance for our community.”

The cemetery began after John Adams Kingsbury Jr., 18, died in 1934 from injuries he suffered in a car crash while a student at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Kingsbury had been riding on a car’s running board with two other students on their way to an initiation ceremony when, according to his New York Times obituary, “the machine skidded across a sidewalk and sideswiped a tree.”

His father, John Adams Kingsbury Sr., was flying from New York City to see him at the hospital when his son died.

The Kingsburys lived in Shady, about 5 miles northwest of Woodstock. The elder Kingsbury was secretary and managing director of the Milbank Memorial Fund, where he promoted public health programs and a national health plan.

To bury his son, Kingsbury bought an 80-by-100-foot plot near the existing Evergreen Cemetery. Friends helped him acquire additional land, and the group incorporated the Woodstock Memorial Society on Nov. 4, 1934.

Other founding members included painter Carl Eric Lindin and sculptor Bruno Zimm, who were associated with the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony; James T. Shotwell, a Columbia University professor and diplomat; and James H. Stagg, an accountant and president of the Woodstock Country Club.

The founders wanted the cemetery to retain its natural beauty, including a view of Overlook Mountain that has since been obscured by trees. With few exceptions, they decided that memorial stones should lie flat against the ground.

One exception is the Shotwell memorial, a boulder inset with a poem by Shotwell. Sculptor Tomas Penning, who carved many of the cemetery’s gravestones, designed and sculpted the memorial.

Another is the memorial to Byrdcliffe founder Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead and his family. Whitehead died in 1929, months after his son died when the ship he was traveling on sank in a gale. Whitehead was first buried at his home below a della Robbia-style Madonna-and-child bas-relief. His remains and the monument were later moved to the cemetery.

A small crouching nude, now partly clothed in moss, marks the 1938 grave of painter and sculptor Enzo Baccante.

Many of the cemetery’s early burials were artists associated with Byrdcliffe.

In 1936, painter and lithographer Bolton Brown, aware of his impending death, chose a boulder for his headstone and carved his name into it. A 2017 article by John Murphy in Art in Print described his burial “on a simple pallet of white birch covered with pine branches.”

Lindin died in 1942. Penning made his gravestone, which includes a carving of a Viking ship.

Woodstock Town Historian Richard Heppner said the cemetery represents the town’s transition from “a fairly conservative town” to one that “became a center for artists.”

Others buried there include jazz pianist Richard Tee; longtime Woodstock gallery owner Gertrude Ross Jarvis; science fiction author Robert Sheckley; and dentist Maurice “Buzzy” Tischler.

The cemetery also holds the grave of Caleb Jones Milne IV, who volunteered with the American Field Service during World War II to evacuate wounded soldiers. He was killed in action in Tunisia in 1943.

Eight years earlier, Milne had faked his own kidnapping in an effort to extort ransom money from his grandfather to finance an acting career; the scandal ended those hopes.

In a letter to his mother from Tunisia, Milne wrote:

“Think of me today, and in the days to come, as I am thinking of you this minute, not gone or alone or dead, but part of the earth beneath you, part of the air around you, part of the heart that must not be lonely.”

Margaret Tomlinson is a contributing writer. You can send her an email at reporting@theoverlooknews.com.