In the 1760s the Willetts, an English family who had settled in this area of Flushing in the 17th century, sold 120 acres to then Lieutenant Governor Cadwallader Colden. Colden named his estate Spring Hill and constructed a mansion (seen here) near the public highway at the northern line of the farm. In the sale of the property, the Willetts required that their family burial ground remain intact and private and that they retained burial rights there in perpetuity.

The state confiscated the property from Colden's son who had remained a Loyalist in the 1780s, after which the home passed through a series of owners. Eventually subsumed by the large Durkee family estate, Cedar Grove Cemetery purchased that 250-acre property in 1893. Later much of what had once been Spring Hill was organized into the separate Jewish cemetery, Mount Hebron. Today, the Willett Family Burial Ground remains, though with only a few extant headstones, about 200 feet east of Mount Hebron’s main entrance.

The mansion of the Colden Estate was used in the early 20th century as administrative offices for the cemetery but was demolished by the mid-century.