Designed by landscape designer Horace W.S. Cleveland, Sleepy Hollow is one of the earliest and best examples of a "rural" or "garden" cemetery. The rural cemetery movement was inspired by romantic ideas about death, and the new attitudes regarding the healing powers of nature and art.

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, the largest of the three cemeteries, is on the National Registry of Historic Places and extends for two-fifths of a mile on the north side of Bedford Street.

Of its estimated 10,000 gravesites, many are of local, national and international significance. Composed of 119 acres, it is laid out in several phases, including the New Burying Ground (1823) and Sleepy Hollow (1855).

Yankee Magazine, in 2022, highlighted Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in an article entitled Where Concord's Legends Lie.