Bailly Cemetery

Bailly Cemetery is a small family burial ground on a wooded hill within the Bailly historic area. Its rusticated stone-and-concrete enclosure and wooden cross make it easy to recognize, but the original grave rows aren’t visible. It’s most rewarding as part of a walk through the Bailly and Chellberg historic area rather than as a drive-up stop of its own.

Reach the cemetery on foot from Bailly/Chellberg Comfort Station. The described route passes the farmhouse and barn, follows a boardwalk, crosses Oak Hill Road and opens into a grassy clearing below the cemetery. Concrete steps lead up to the enclosure. Parking and restrooms are at the Comfort Station, not at the burial ground; the approach includes stairs, so it may not work for every visitor.

The National Park Service identifies Napoleon “Robert” Bailly, Joseph and Marie’s son, as the first burial here in 1827. Rose Howe later built a six-foot limestone wall around the grounds. In 1914, her granddaughter Frances Rose Howe hired local builder Theodore Stephens to encase it in a rusticated concrete wall. They filled the enclosure with sand to the height of the new walls, burying the original cemetery about seven feet below the present surface. You’re seeing a later memorial enclosure, not rows of exposed early markers.

Joseph Bailly marked the hill with a large oak cross and built a small shelter where his household could pray. Rose fenced the cemetery in 1866 and asked nearby Swedish families to stop burying relatives there; the park’s history records that at least three Swedish immigrants were interred while she was away in Europe from 1869 to 1874. Frances later bought a new cross in California, which Stephens mounted above the wall. In morning light, its shadow can fall across the enclosure. Look closely at Stephens’s cement plaque, too: one letter in its inscription was accidentally reversed.