This early burial ground is on the old Lawrence Townsend farm, near the site of one of the first taverns in the area, where the Jerusalem town meetings were held when that town included all of what is now Benton, Milo and Torrey, in addition to a largely uninhabited Jerusalem.

The cemetery is abandoned, and despite its importance and sporadic attempts to clean it up, unmaintained. The stones are in a dense thicket of sumac and briars, very few of them intact and standing. Some earlier lists contain mention of burials now removed to Lakeview Cemetery in Penn Yan.

The Townsend Cemetery has several alternative names. It is sometimes referred to as the Head Street Cemetery, from the old name for North Avenue, which runs along the town line inside the limits of the village of Penn Yan. North Avenue is actually an extension of what is now Stiles Road and is in fact one of the county's earliest, an old stage route between Geneva and Bath via Hopeton and Penn Yan. On tax-exempt lists the cemetery is usually referred to as Southeast Benton Rural Cemetery, and the neighborhood is called variously Whitford's, Winship's or Shaw's Corners.

Sometimes this ground is even called the Hazen or Hazens Corners Cemetery; the Hazen farm straddled the town line, and the family's burying ground was in Milo, south of Stiles Road, and the corners in question was at its intersection with Townsend Road, which runs south from Stiles Road a very short distance west of the Preemption Road. The Hazen gravestones are now in Lakeview Cemetery in Penn Yan.