The Union Cemetery, like all of the other cemeteries in the study area (Towns of Cazenovia, Fenner, and Nelson in western Madison County, NY), was well planned and organized at an early day.  While the original burying area of the cemetery, located on a low knoll at the north end of the grounds, may have been rather informal at first, it is clear that when the cemetery was enlarged to the south about 1814, there was great care and planning in the laying out of the new area.
        In the collections of the New Woodstock Historical Society are some of the papers for this cemetery (I have not examined them yet) and among them is a plan of the cemetery, said to have been made about 1814 ( I do not doubt this).  I was given a sketch of this plan by Francis Fuggle, of the Society, and this tracing, and the field survey that I conducted in 1994, were used in drawing the map here presented.
        Today the cemetery is in considerable disarray and it has been quite abused over the years, with many stones removed from the original places and gathered together in two large areas where they are cemented flat to the ground.  Other stones are scattered about and some were found piled in the corners.  Many stones, however, are still standing upright, apparently in their original places, and these intact stones helped in the reconstruction given here.  The copy of the c.1814 plan that I was given is not to scale, does not show the original (northern) end of the cemetery, and does not show any physical landmarks such as trees or stones.
        In my field survey I first thought that little or no pattern could be discerned in the scattered family groups, and that damage done to the cemetery by time and in the name of "cleaning up" had erased any evidence of the original organization.  I was very wrong about this as I eventually found that many of the family clusters mapped in 1994 were closely matching the family plots shown on the c.1814 map!  Not all of the names on the old map matched the family clusters of tombstones indicating that the plots were sold off to other families after the map was made, but many of them did match perfectly (some were a few feet out of alignment indicating a period of lax control after the initial laying out).  From the field data that I gathered and drew to scale, I was easily able to see that the patterns that were part of the cemetery as it was designed c.1814 were still very much intact 180 years later in 1994.
        In my field survey I carefully mapped all of the prominent landscape features such as tombstone clusters, landscape elements, and topographical features.  This data was used as a base to re-scale the c.1814 map.  Once I realized that the c.1814 plan did not show the old section on the north, I saw that the two maps matched very nicely and that many of the family clusters still found in the cemetery, and which I had mapped, matched names and locations given on the map.
        The large black dots show the location of the many sugar maples (acer sacharum) which ring the cemetery (cedars are not shown).  These trees, in their clear 20 by 25 foot pattern, clearly show the original organization of the cemetery, with a tree at the outside corners of each row of plots, and a few inside on plot corners.  Only two maples were found to be off line from this pattern, one on the south line, and one within the original section of the cemetery.  As can be seen from the survey below, no plots were discernible in the northern end of the cemetery where the original (pre-c.1814) cemetery was located.  The earliest burials, those of Luther Waterman and Deborah Bradt who both died in 1807, are located on a low knoll at the spot marked "Original Burial Ground" on my survey.  Although there is a plot set aside for "strangers" in the southwest corner, it appears that the northern end of the cemetery, around the earliest burials, was either reserved for other strangers or was not used again as there are few visible burials in this section.
        The making of this map allowed me to give a last name to one of the unknowns in this cemetery:  In the northwest section is a shale fieldstone marked only "S.W. 1814".  When I completed the map I realized that this stone is found on the plot marked on the c.1814 map as being owned by "A. Wilcox".  I have yet to identify the first name of this Wilcox, but it is nice to know something that would have otherwise remained obscure and forgotten.