At his own request, Andrew Carnegie was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in North Tarrytown, New York. The site was designed by the famous landscape architect Frederick Olmstead, who gave shape to Central Park and other historic outdoor spaces. Interred with Carnegie are his wife Louise and servants who were valued members of the Carnegie household. His grave is marked by a simple Celtic cross cut from stone quarried near Skibo, his summer home in Scotland.

While the reason Andrew Carnegie chose to be buried outside New York City has been lost to history, his great-granddaughter, Linda Thorell Hills, says the general feeling in the family is that America was chosen because Carnegie, above all, felt himself to be an American. It was with immense gratitude that he recognized this country enabled him to realize his potential, which he did beyond his wildest dreams. In addition, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, which covers about 100 acres and has forty thousand burials within its grounds, was the final resting place for a number of Carnegie acquaintances and contemporaries, including William Rockefeller, Walter Chrysler and others.

In recent years, Carnegie’s last living grandchild, Barbara Miller Lawson, who died in 2002, urged Vartan Gregorian, president of Carnegie Corporation of New York, to investigate the condition of her grandfather’s resting place, worried that the perpetual endowment established by her grandmother was no longer adequate to ensure the gravesite’s upkeep. When Gregorian and other staff visited Sleepy Hollow, they found the gravesite of our founder a place somewhat neglected and forgotten, hidden by trees and overgrown bushes.
To ensure the dignity of the Carnegie gravesite, the Corporation supported the landscaping of the plot and, in August of this year, installed a new bronze marker on the walkway outside the gravesite so that those who go to the beautiful and historic cemetery will know they can walk into the glade and see Carnegie’s resting place. Carnegie’s face is engraved in bronze and the names of the 21 institutions he founded and endowed are etched on the marker—“the living legacy of Mr. Carnegie.”

Hills wrote to thank Gregorian for the Corporation’s attention to the gravesite saying, “It’s almost a pilgrimage of sorts to visit Sleepy Hollow. Grandpa ‘Naigie’ continues to positively impact so many lives today, and I think he would be very honored by the continuing significance and profound influence of his philanthropy.”

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