Take Route 19 south to 305, then turn onto the 2nd Lake Road on the right. As you get to the end of Havens/ Lake Road, you can see the Greenway trail cutting through at the end of the road on your left. When you walk down the trail to the LEFT, after about a mile, you will come across a bench in memory of Phil Austin. The poem says, “Not all who wander are lost.” To the left of the bench is a small trail that goes off the path.
That trail leads to the Old Irish cemetery. The gravestones are in a circular field and are laid about randomly. There are many trees around the field and no fence around the area. There are many poems on the gravestones in memory of those buried there. Most of the graves are from the late 1700 to the early 1800s. The oldest one found was from 1793, and the most recent one is from the year 1857. That’s over one hundred years old! There are only 10 gravestones and most of the buried are from the Dort, Raymond, and Miller families.
The cemetery used to be neat and cleaned up. But as the years went by, people may have forgotten about this local historic site. There’s now a tree directly in the middle of the whole field. It is overgrown with weeds, and there is tree debris everywhere. It hurts to see these memorial sites forgotten and overgrown by nature. I hope that in the future it will eventually be taken care of and cleared of debris.
Why is this cemetery so close to Rockville Lake? According to local history, many Irish moved into Belfast around the time this cemetery was made. Rockville Lake used to be a much bigger community at the time the canal was built. It used to be a town with over 800 inhabitants! Those buried there may have been workers for building the canal or the lake. The lake also used to be a massive quarry. To find more about the history of the lake, you can go to this website.
-by Avery Enders, Belfast Central School Class of 2029