Have A Blast! Traditional Cache
New York Admin: No response from the cache owner places me in a position where I must archive this cache as abandoned. Caches archived by a site volunteer or HQ for lack of maintenance or non communication may not be unarchived.
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This Cache is to celebrate out 100th find!
***10/31/10*** I repaired the cache and decided to rename and rehide the cache in a new location very nearby! Happy caching!
We are placing it in a local park near our home that desperately needed a cache.
I wrote a short essay about the very interesting history of this park below the listing if you are interested. It was not always the peaceful park that you see today!
Not much room for anything other then the log book and the small pencil that's there. BYOP just in case the pencil is gone or needs to be sharpened.
High muggle area in the nicer weather so some acting may be necessary.
Driving through this park will give you the opportunity to meet the fine men and women of the Cohoes Police department. Truly great people to meet, just not under these circumstances. The road through the park is for maintenance use only.
Have fun, and enjoy The Neumann families very first Cache!
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We did some research on this park and I thought it might be nice to share some of our findings with you. The reason that we were interested in this park is that we live in one of the houses very near the park. One day a few years back I was doing some landscaping in the back yard. I was removing an old slate walk way and replacing it with grass when I unearthed a very old headstone and then a second headstone shortly after. The stones had once marked the graves of 2 small children, one 5yrs and one 21 months.
Curious as to whether we resided on an old cemetery, we contacted our local historian. What we found out was quite an amazing story. This park, known as West End Park, in 1846 was the Cohoes Company Cemetery!
This particular cemetery drew the ire of residents because it had degenerated into a potter's field. The grounds were not maintained and worse, the earth in this area is a swampy, dense clay that was not conducive to long term burials. It was with some pressure from the community that this cemetery be relocated and the grounds turned into a park.
The minutiae surrounding the legal proceedings and the chain of events before and during the relocation process are very interesting but much too much to relay here. One interesting tidbit is that workers digging in the clay here reported that 3 or 4 feet down the pits became swamp therefore coating the pine boxes and the remains with a layer of clay slurry. Men unearthed "black and slimy bones of the long buried dead".
The bodies were to be relocated to another plot in the area who's location will remain undisclosed here as it is part of another multi cache. Only 40 bodies could be identified out of many hundreds that were exhumed. Those 40 individuals were the power players in Cohoes in the 18th and 19th centuries and are the stones that you see at the new burial ground today. Names like Lansing and Fonda. The rest were given a mass burial in and around the same area and has no marker.
One more thing...in 1968 the new(name withheld to not give away another cache) Cemetery Board of Trustees notified then Cohoes Mayor James McDonald that the City was behind in the payment of their annual upkeep annuity of $22 for minimal maintenance. The city had been negligent since 1952. The mayors response was: "I can't see why we should pay this money annually when we aren't getting any use of it." For years, those hollowed grounds were a forgotten disgrace.
Recently someone has cleared the plot and put up a new fence. Now that you know the story, it's time you lived some of the history...keep an eye out for a new multi-cache highlighting this interesting move.
**CONGRATS TO TIMPAT FOR FTF**
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