Rural Cemetery Act

The law led to burial of human remains becoming a commercial business for the first time, replacing the practice of burying the dead in churchyards and on private farmland.

[1] The law's enactment came during an era when a burgeoning urban population was crowding out Manhattan churchyards traditionally used for burials[2] and the concept of the rural cemetery on the outskirts of a city was becoming stylish.

The Act was significant because it was made easier to establish charitable corporations for rural cemeteries.

The move to rural burial grounds was accelerated by public suspicion that contamination from graveyards had been a cause of the epidemics of cholera that occurred in New York City in 1832 and 1849.

[5] Calvary Cemetery, in Queens, which recorded its first burial in 1848, was created on land that the trustees of St. Patrick's Cathedral had begun to buy up two years earlier.

[2][12] Between 1854 and 1856, more than 15,000 bodies were exhumed from churchyards in Manhattan and Williamsburg and moved to Cypress Hills Cemetery.

[2] Over the decades, Cypress Hills Cemetery alone is estimated to have reburied the remains of 35,000 people disinterred from their original burial sites in Manhattan.