JAMAICA — Stepping cautiously between crumbling gravestones of Revolutionary and Civil War veterans, Cate Ludlam scanned one of the city's oldest cemeteries and choked back tears at the progress she's made since first undertaking a massive preservation project there in 1989.
In the shade of the trees that dot the four-acre graveyard, Ludlam lauded a recent infusion of $1 million in state and city funding that has paid for crews to clear weeds and brush from the oldest part of the cemetery, the portion near 158th Street, which dates at least to 1668.
"I'm sure there were points where I could have walked away, but I couldn't," said Ludlam, whose ancestors are among the hundreds buried at Prospect Cemetery, an overlooked landmark on a demapped stretch of 159th Street off Archer Avenue, on the York College campus. "I couldn't. I dream about this place. The dreams are no longer nightmares."
She hopes the brush-clearing eventually leads to the rejuvenation of the cemetery, where many tombstones have been knocked over by vandals or smashed by falling trees.
"This is the turning point," said Ludlam, 64, who lives in Glen Cove, Long Island.
Officially, Ludlam serves as president of the Prospect Cemetery Association of Jamaica Village. But most preservationists know her simply as the cemetery's unpaid caretaker and savior, driven by her passion for historic preservation. She is also motivated by respect for the soldiers buried there since her father and uncles were World War II veterans.
"The way I was raised, you respect the last resting place of the dead," she said. "To desecrate the grave of a soldier is a terrible thing."
When Ludlam first visited the cemetery 23 years ago, she said she was startled by the head-high vegetation and broken tombstones.
"Every time we discovered a stone that was damaged," she said, "it hurt me."
Even many of the limestone and marble tombstones that went untouched by vandals have faded significantly, making inscriptions hard to read. The name of founding father Egbert Benson, the state's first attorney general, can barely be made out on his marker.
But many tombstones chiseled from brownstone are remarkably preserved with motifs of skulls and angels above touching literary tributes. A marker for a woman who died at age 36 in 1817 quotes a Christian hymn: "Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord; They die in Jesus and are blest; How kind their slumbers are; From suffering and from sin releas'd; And freed from every snare."
Fronting the cemetery is the Chapel of the Sisters, whose construction was financed in the late 1850s by a heartbroken father, Nicholas Ludlum, as a tribute to his three daughters who died at ages 1, 13 and 21. (Cate Ludlam, is a descendant of Ludlum and his daughters, but the surname spelling changed over the years.) Like the cemetery, the chapel fell into disrepair, but Ludlam oversaw its restoration and re-opening in 2008. It now hosts occasional concerts.
Each day at the cemetery brings new discoveries of graves that Ludlam has never seen before, sometimes of patriots she didn't know were buried there. Near the back of the cemetery on 158th Street, Ludlam beamed this week when removing growth around the grave of Shakespearean actor James H. Hackett, a favorite of President Abraham Lincoln.
Ludlam predicted the restoration will be completed in a few years, opening a hidden historic gem to the community.
"I hope that in the future, this will always be respected," she said.
