08/22/2026
Thanks to our friend Gerard Bringmann for passing this along to us!
Lakeview Cemetery in Patchogue dates to 1791, when burial grounds were established behind the Union Church at Waverly Avenue and West Main Street. The church is gone, but the cemetery remains, divided today between the abandoned Waverly Avenue Cemetery and property owned by St. Paul’s Episcopal Church and the Episcopal Diocese.
Among its more unusual features is the Smith Genealogical Monument, described as the largest white-bronze monument in the United States. The cemetery also contains four 20-foot monuments to the Smith sisters, members of a prominent local family whose land and philanthropy helped shape Patchogue.
Four sailors from the 1895 wreck of the Louis V. Place are buried there after the Smith sisters provided eight burial plots for the crew. The other four plots remain empty. Local lore has since supplied the inevitable stories of sailors being seen walking through the cemetery.
Lakeview also contains the graves of veterans from the Revolutionary War through Vietnam, suffrage advocate Elizabeth Oakes Smith, and George W. Tims, a 10-year-old boy who died in 1855 whose headstone identifies him as a “colored boy, bound to A. Roe.” More than 1,000 headstones are believed to be on the Waverly side alone, although many are now missing or buried underground.
Today, restoration work continues to preserve the cemetery, locate missing graves and repair hundreds of stones in need of professional attention.
Read more about the history, notable graves and local legends of Lakeview Cemetery: https://scifisland.com/lakeview-cemetery-the-patchogue-graveyard-full-of-poets-patriots-and-possibly-ghosts/
