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The Croft Children
Olive Amelia Born 1851 Died Jun 30, 1860
Rachel Alice Born 1848 Died Jun 30, 1860
Rachel O. Born Oct 17, 1860 Died Sep 3, 1863
Seth Born 1850 Died Mar 21, 1854
Red Hook Methodist Cemetery, Village of Red Hook. North end, against the fence on the western side.
Here lie children of Abram and Anna Croft - four children without their parents.
Abram Croft, born in 1836, and his wife Anna were from England. He worked in a woolen mill in Red Hook when he and his family were enumerated in the census on July 17th, 1860. They lived in the hamlet of Cedar Hill, south of Annandale and had many children, Rachel (1848), Seth (1850), Olive (1851), Field (1853), Arthur (1855), Asa (1858), and more would come in later years.
The first child to pass was Seth, who was only four years old in 1854. He was laid to rest here, first.
Photo of W. Kilmer house, in Annandale where the Crofts resided.
On Saturday, June 30th, 1860 the Crofts’ “young and charming” daughters Olive and Rachel were playing in a swimming hole on the Saw Kill below the site of the Fritz flour mill. According to local writer Edmund Bassett, “one sister was taken with cramps and the other went to her rescue” and both of them drowned. The Crofts had now lost three children in six years, and Anna was pregnant again. When a daughter was born to them in October of that year, they named her Rachel O. (presumably the O stood for Olive, both names being an homage to her lost sisters). She would live only three short years and be interred here in 1863.
The Crofts remained in Dutchess County for a few more years and had a daughter, Lavina (1863) before moving around a bit. First, perhaps to Illinois where they had son Joseph in 1866, then to Esopus in Ulster County where Abram and three of his sons worked in a woolen mill again, then to Little Falls in Herkimer County, NY where Abram was marked as a “cattle dealer”. He died sometime after 1880 and it is unknown where he and Anna are buried. Families having to move to find work and leave children interred in a local cemetery behind was an all too common occurrence in the nineteenth century. There is comfort in the thought that these four little ones are together and remembered.