Fairview Cemetery of Bethlehem, Northampton County, PA
Fairview Cemetery, located at North New St. & Washington Ave. in historic Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, is owned and operated by Roy Schreffler who we had
the extreme pleasure of meeting during our visit. Roy is an avid history and genealogy enthusiast. He purchased
this not-for-profit business because he has many ancestors interred here and wanted to make certain that the substantial physical upkeep was
properly attended to. Roy rolls a lawn mower out from a home he purchased next door and takes care of the well maintained grounds himself.
Roy is the type of individual who will purchase a book, using his personal funds, which pertains to someone interred in Fairview,
often unrelated to himself, just so he can learn the history of that person and/or their family.
The mailing address for the cemetery office is:
1449 Lenox Ave.
Bethlehem, PA 18018
and the phone number is (610) 866-1032
Website containing loads of historical and other information: fairviewplot.com/
Roy personally bears the cost of maintaining the property which is at times fairly substantial. He mows the grass personally to save money,
lifts and straightens fallen markers, removes fallen trees, etc. This he does in his spare time as he is otherwise employed in an unrelated job
and earns no living from operating Fairview. He also entertains such
thankless tasks as taking pictures of markers for those who request them and other time consuming tasks related to requests by those whose family
members are interred here. If you have some sort of information request for Roy we ask you to first attempt to get the information through
other channels, and at least do most of the leg work upfront before contacting him.
Fairview is a medium sized cemetery holding perhaps 5,000 burials. There is burial space available for purchase. Roy estimated
that perhaps 400 plots remain unused. If you are interested in arranging a future burial in a nice, quiet, properly maintained, park-like
setting, we strongly encourage you to contact Roy as the 400 remaining plots will certainly not be available for ever.
We were only able to photograph a small slice of Fairview, taking perhaps 600+ pictures, because we were visiting the area on unrelated matters
and had only a few hours for the task. At this point, I really do not know whether we will be able to return to the cemetery to make
additional progress on this work. We hope you derive some benefit from the work we have done but at this point, we cannot entertain any
requests for additional photography related to the cemetery.
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