June 15, 2011:  Without the sound of bagpipes or a marching band, Bronxville's Cub Scouts paid a quiet tribute two days before Memorial Day by planting 148 American flags in a quiet corner unknown to many Bronxville residents.  The site is the Bronxville Cemetery, which has been a final resting place for hundreds of village families for more than a century.

The cemetery is tucked into 1.8 acres behind Bronxville Village Hall, bounded by the Department of Public Works truck depot on Palumbo Place, Midland Avenue, and Alden Place.  No sign indicates the location, and the cemetery is reached only by a driveway adjacent to a two-story frame house occupied by the manager, Dr. David A. Weir, and his wife, Dr. Bonnie E. Weir, the third generation of caretakers.

The cemetery has no connection to any Bronxville church.  It was moved to Bronxville in 1852 from Manhattan by the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America (Covenanter Synod).

The cemetery's history was written by David Weir in Building a Suburban Village, the history published for Bronxville's centennial in 1998.  A teacher at Nyack College, he is the son of Dr. Richard Weir, chairman of the English department at Pelham High School; his wife, Jean Crawford, was a teacher at Bronxville Elementary School.  She was also the daughter of earlier caretakers of the cemetery, John and Alice Crawford, emigrants from Scotland.

The place was even more obscure before 1947, when bulldozers cleared a wooded hill at the corner of Palumbo Place and Midland to make room for the Bronxville firehouse.

Most of the several hundred tombstones are modest, but a handful of obelisks tower above the rest, and the cemetery also contains two locked crypts.  Among the notables buried there is Lewis Bowman, the celebrated architect of many Bronxville homes.   His is an austere monument containing only his name, the word "architect," and the years of his birth and death.

Among the more poignant markers is that of a 17-year-old, so weather-beaten that the words cannot be read.  The gravestone of a John A. Adams notes that he was a presenter in the Reformed Presbyterian Church.

If the cemetery is unknown to many village residents, it is known to funeral directors, who mention it as an option among burial sites to bereaved families.  The cemetery is non-denominational, but applications must be reviewed by the church.

The Bronxville Cemetery is about to be somewhat better known because it is included in a major new three-volume publication, The Cemeteries of Westchester County, by Patrick Raferty, published by the Westchester County Historical Society.