Scout Identifies and Honors Hundreds of Deceased Sleepy Hollow War Veterans

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flag volunteers — Robert DelVecchio & friends honor Sleepy Hollow war veterans

November 7, 2020

By Barrett Seaman—

Robert DelVecchio first became interested in how many of the thousands of people buried in Sleepy Hollow’s vast cemetery were war veterans when he was 16. He was then a Boy Scout looking for a project that would help qualify him for the ultimate rank in scouting: Eagle Scout. At first, a fellow scout claimed the daunting task of identifying all the vets from all America’s wars, but being a year older, he recognized that he wouldn’t be able to complete it before aging out of the Scouts at age 18. So Robert took on .

LtoR-Scoutmaster-Dave-Cusick-Robert-DelVecchio-and-Cemetery-Supt.-Jim-Logan

“I worked on the project from start to finish in ten months,” says Robert, now 17 and a junior at Archbishop Stepinac High School, allowing that it probably would have taken longer were it not that being in quarantine in the spring gave him more time to work on it.

With the help of cemetery Superintendent, Jim Logan, Robert combed through the database of the 45,000 people buried in the cemetery against Ancestry.com’s Veteran site as well as the U.S. military archives to determine who among them had served. He found two Revolutionary Veterans and Civil War Vets among 750 vets all told.

Robert DelVecchio places a flag at the grave of Civil War veteran George Munson

On Saturday, October 31, Robert, with his Scoutmaster, Dave Cusick, the rest of his Scout Troop 22 and about 25 volunteers set out to plant a flag (donated by the Village of Sleepy Hollow) at each of hundreds of veteran grave sites.

Photographs by Margaret Fox

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