Presbrey-Leland Monument Company, 1930-1980 | The Green-Wood Cemetery

31 boxes: 13 document and 18 oversize. The files held within both the document boxes and oversized boxes are arranged numerically by Green-Wood Cemetery lot number.  Each folder also indicates the name of the client or estate and the Presbrey-Leland account number, and is labeled in the following format: “Presbrey-Leland account number / Green-Wood Cemetery lot number / name of client and/or estate.”

The Presbrey-Leland Monument Company is a New England-based company that was founded over a century ago by the Presbrey and Leland families. The company is currently located in Valhalla, New York, but was formerly situated on 5th Avenue in midtown Manhattan.  The company produces and designs monuments, mausoleums, plaques, markers, and gravesite landscapes and was considered an innovator of American monument and mausoleum design during the mid-twentieth century.  Presbrey-Leland, Inc. has been affiliated with a number of contractors and subsidiary companies; several books on monument design and funerary architecture were published in the 1920s, 30s and 50s under the imprint “Presbrey-Leland Studios.”  The company has created mausoleums for luminaries such as William Rockefeller and Walter P. Chrysler.

Green-Wood Cemetery, a National Historic Landmark and one of America’s first rural cemeteries, recently acquired part of the Presbrey-Leland Monument Company Archives.  The records of the Presbrey-Leland Monument Company were initially transmitted to the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York, and Susan Olsen, the Historian at Woodlawn, oversaw the disposition of the records and subsequent transmittal to appropriate repositories.  The historic records documenting memorial designs and the development of the cemetery at Woodlawn, including a number of Presbrey-Leland records, were donated to the Avery Architectural and Fine Art Library at Columbia University in 2006.  The Green-Wood Cemetery retains a similar collection of historic memorial design records from the Presbrey-Leland Monument Company archives that pertain directly to Green-Wood.

Brooklyn--New York, N.Y.
Cemeteries--New York (State)--New York--History
Green-Wood Cemetery--New York, N.Y.
Landscape architecture--New York (State)--New York--Designs and plans
New York (N.Y.)--Buildings, structures,etc.
Sepulchral monuments--New York (State)--New York