CORTLAND, NY (607NewsNow) — Each day, the City of Cortland bustles with the lives of approximately 17,556 residents.
Just beyond its streets lies a quieter place where more souls rest than currently walk the city’s sidewalks. The Cortland Rural Cemetery (CRC) is home to approximately 18,000 graves, slightly outnumbering the living population of the city itself.
Founded in April 1855, the cemetery began on eleven acres sold by David and Ann Hubbard but has since grown to approximately fifty acres.
Initially, it served as a re‑burial site for churchyards and small burial grounds. Over time, its landscape was designed to serve not only as a final resting place but as a garden‑cemetery: a place remembrance and beauty.
Among the 18,000 interred are some of Cortland’s most notable voices:
- Governor Nathan Miller, the last governor elected from upstate New York (in 1920), who held office until 1922.
- Otto Hermann, an early 20th‑century aviator and engineer, who built his own biplane and later moved to Cortland during the development of the county airport.
- Dr. Julia Spalding, one of the nation’s earliest female physicians, practicing in Cortland from 1883, specializing in women’s and children’s diseases and chronic illnesses. She passed away in 1916.
- Major General Levi R. Chase, a decorated U.S. Air Force pilot who flew over 500 missions through World War II and Vietnam, retiring in 1974; Cortland’s county airport bears his name.
Though many of these figures lived long before the present city, their lives are woven into the fabric of Cortland’s identity just as the cemetery itself is woven into its landscape.
Today, CRC offers “Cemetrails,” a guided tour system that leads visitors through the graves of the notable, the unsung, and the everyday, all beneath a canopy of trees changing colors as fall sets in.
For more information about CRC and how to explore it while paying respects to its population, visit their website here.
