All Dogs Go to Heaven Traditional Geocache
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Welcome to the Hartsdale Pet Cemetery
In seeking out a place of interest near which to place a cache, I remembered this odd little spot which I'd passed many times, but never stopped at. And why would I stop here anyway? To visit the grave of somebody else's dead pet? Well today I stopped, and as is often the case in geocaching, I learned.
The Hartsdale Pet Cemetery, formerly the Hartsdale Canine Cemetery has a rich and very interesting history. It was the first cemetery devoted to pets in the whole country. It dates back to 1896 and holds the remains of approximately seventy-thousand animals. There is a structure on the grounds which was the country home of a veterinarian named Dr. Sam Johnson who established the cemetery, quite inadvertently, when a client requested that her late, beloved dog be buried in Dr. Johnson's apple orchard. When word got out, the good vet was besieged with requests by people to have their pets buried there. Thus the untapped market of clients who wished to inter their pets in dignified and beautiful surroundings finally had an outlet, and the rest is history. Though the client list contains predominantly dogs and cats, there are horses, parrots, monkeys, alligators, a lion and even several humans, who could not bear to be separated from their pets even in death. There is nothing macabre about the place, and in fact is more well-maintained than many of the human cemeteries which we have encountered so many times in caching. You can read more about it on the related web page accessed at the link above
So come for the cache, but take a stroll around. There's a lot to see and many of the epitaphs are very touching indeed!
Congrats to Taxman417 for the very quick FTF!
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
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