6. Flatland Dutch Reformed Churchyard (1663)

The Flatlands Dutch Reformed Church‘s graveyard was established in about 1663 and is still an active cemetery. The designation report on the National Register of Historic Places calls it an “ancient graveyard [which] is surrounded by large old trees and imparts an air of tranquil beauty to the whole setting.” Located at 3931 Kings Highway, between Flatbush Avenue and Overbaugh Place, the church was established in 1654, one of the three Dutch Reformed churches created in Brooklyn under the direction of Peter Stuyvesant that year. 

The current white Greek Revival church that stands there today was built in 1848 and later enlarged. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission calls out the church as a “a living image of rural worship of a type which has all but disappeared from the City.” Buried in the graveyard is Reverend Ulpianus Van Sinderen, a Revolutionary War-era Dutch minister who was nicknamed “The Rebel Parson.” Underneath the pulpit of the church is buried Pieter Claeson Wykoff. His house in Carnasie is the oldest surviving structure in all of New York City. Like other colonial-era graveyards that began limiting burials, only those who already had plots could be interred here after 1910.