The Grave of The Bridgens

This worn and mossy marble stone is set high on a hill near the path leading past the Appleton lot to the little bridge which crosses Moordenaers Kill to connect the South Ridge with the western end of the Middle Ridge.  Also set into this hillside are the vaults of the Pumpelly-Read, Stanford, and Pester-Osterhout families.

 This stone reads simply Grave of The Bridgens. 

Fitzgerald's 1871 Handbook For The Albany Rural Cemetery describes this somewhat obscure monument:

If we look sharply we will see...a low block of marble inscribed "The Grave of The Bridgens," and some distance back of it a single undecorated grave.  The simple quaintess of the inscription has provoked many a query, and yet there is nothing cabalistic in it.  The grave contains the reinterred remains of several members of the Bridgen family. 

Only a Thomas Atwater Bridgen, an attorney, appears in the inventory of graves moved from the old State Street Burying Grounds to the Rural Cemetery's Church Grounds.  He is among those buried beneath this unusual stone.