Two distinctively different small cemeteries are to be found on Lake Ave. on the road to Lake Compounce, the Beth Israel Cemetery and the Lake Avenue Cemetery.
Rumor has it that the Beth Israel Cemetery has the dubious distinction of a listing in Ripley's Believe It or Not as the oldest cemetery to have no occupants as of 1954, having been created in 1929. Perhaps of greatest interest is one headstone with a brass Matzevah marker signaling that the young man was a Holocaust survivor. This plaque has a Jewish star entangled with barbed wire and an olive branch. The brass markers are provided by the The American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors & Their Descendants (http://www.amgathering.org/).
The Lake Avenue Cemetery was established in 1841, and has at least one Civil War soldier's gravestone (photo, Anson W. Ball), presumably the family's gravestone on the ground (in two pieces), with an upright gravestone from the State in recognition of the soldier. J. Harwood “Stretch” Norton, a former owner of Lake Compounce, ex-mayor and a World War II veteran who saw kamikazes plunging into ships off Okinawa, is one of the more recent buried.
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