Unearthing History: Centuries-old cemetery for Africans who were enslaved unearthed in New York

This spot of tightly-packed houses in the city of Kingston was a cemetery for people who were enslaved as far back as 1750 and remained a burial ground until the late 1800s, when the cemetery was covered over as the city grew.

Now, college students are carefully digging in the green backyards of the homes and making all sorts of discoveries.

In the last three summers, the remains of up to 27 people have been located. Grave markers have been found, one for Caezar Smith, who was born enslaved and died a free man in 1839.

Advocates hope more mysteries could be unlocked. While the names of people buried here may be lost, tests are planned on their remains to shed light on their lives and the identities of their descendants.

“The hardships of those buried here cannot just go down in vain,” said Tyrone Wilson, founder of Harambee Kingston, the nonprofit community group raising money to turn the spot, called the Pine Street African Burial Ground, into a respectful resting place. “We have a responsibility to make sure that we fix that disrespect.”

The site is one of many forgotten or neglected cemeteries for African Americans around the U.S. that are getting fresh attention.

Advocates in this Hudson River city purchased a residential property covering about half the old cemetery several years ago and now use the house there as a visitor center.

While the more-than-half-acre (0.2 hectares) site was designated as a cemetery for people who were enslaved in 1750, it might have been in use before then. Burials continued through about 1878, more than 50 years after New York fully abolished slavery. Researchers say people were buried with their feet to the east, so when they rise on Judgment Day, they would face the rising sun.

Remains found on the Harambee property are covered with patterned African cloths and kept where they are. Remains found on adjoining land are exhumed for later burial on the Harambee property.

Students from the State University of New York at New Paltz recently finished a third summer of supervised backyard excavations in this city 80 miles (129 kilometers) upriver from Manhattan. The students get course credit, though anthropology major Maddy Thomas said there’s an overriding sense of mission.

“I don’t like when people feel upset or forgotten,” Thomas said on a break. “And that is what’s happened here. So we’ve got to fix it.”

Harambee is trying to raise $1 million to transform the modest backyard into a resting spot that reflects the African heritage of the people buried there. Plans include a tall marker in the middle of the yard.

While some graves were apparently marked, it’s still hard to say who was buried there.

“Some of them, it’s obvious, were marked with just a stone with no writing on it,” said Joseph Diamond, an associate professor of anthropology at New Paltz.

The only intact headstone recovered with a name visible was for Smith, who died in 1839 at the age of 41. A researcher mined historical records and came up with two more people potentially buried there in 1803: a man identified as Sam and a 16-year-old girl named Deyon who was publicly hanged after being convicted of murdering the 6-year-old daughter of her enslavers.

The cemetery was at first covered by a lumberyard by 1880, even though some gravestones were apparently still standing at that date.

In 1990, Diamond was doing an archaeological survey for the city and noticed the cemetery was marked on a map from 1870. He and the city historian went out to find it.

Coincidentally, Pine Street building owner Andrew Kirschner had just discovered buried bone chips while digging in front of the building in search of a sewer pipe. He put the pieces in a box. Kirschner said he was still digging when Diamond told him what they were looking for.

“The conversation begins and then I go, ‘Well, let me show you what I found.’ Of course, they were amazed,” said Kirschner, who had owned the building next to the current Harambee property.

Even after the discovery, Diamond said it was difficult to convince people that there were graves on Pine Street. There were even plans in 1996 to build a parking lot over much of the site. Advocates purchased the property in 2019.

Similar stories of disregard and rediscovery have played out elsewhere.

In Manhattan, the African Burial Ground National Monument marks the site where an estimated 15,000 free and enslaved Africans were buried until the 1790s. It was discovered in 1991 during excavations for a federal building. Farther up the Hudson River, the renovation in Newburgh of a century-old school into a courthouse in 2008 led to the discovery of more than 100 sets of remains.

Antoinette Jackson, founder of The Black Cemetery Network, said many of the 169 sites listed in their online archive had been destroyed.

“A good deal of them represent sites that have been built over — by parking lots, schools, stadiums, highways. Others have been under-resourced,” said Jackson, a professor of anthropology at the University of South Florida.

She added that the cemeteries listed in the archive are just the “tip of the iceberg.”

Given the meager historical record in Kingston, advocates hope tests on the remains will help fill in some of the gaps. Broken bones may point to occupational hazards. Isotopic analyses could provide information on whether individuals grew up elsewhere — like South Carolina or Africa — and then moved to the region. DNA analyses could provide information on where in Africa their ancestors came from. The DNA tests also might be able to link them to living descendants.

Wilson said local families have committed to providing DNA samples. He sees the tests as another way to connect people to their heritage.

“One of the biggest issues that we have in African culture is that we don’t know our history,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of information of who we are.”