Vale Cemetery

Vale Cemetery is a historic, nonsectarian rural cemetery of about 100 acres on State Street in the City of Schenectady.

The grounds hold more than 33,000 burials, including the African-American Ancestral Burial Ground, in a park-like landscape laid out in the Rural Cemetery Movement tradition, and the cemetery still provides burial and cremation services.

What to know

• Moses Viney, who escaped slavery on the Underground Railroad, is buried in the African-American Ancestral Burial Ground.
• Union College president Eliphalet Nott donated the cemetery’s first entrance, on Nott Terrace.
• The cemetery office keeps burial records that help with genealogy research.