KINGSTON, NY — In a residential area in upstate New York, students dug through the soil in their backyard this summer as part of an archaeological investigation into a centuries-old African-American burial site.
Now covered with green lawns in the city of Kingston, this site was part of a burial ground for enslaved people in the 1750s. It was located on what were then the outskirts of the city. An unknown number of people who were denied church burials were buried here until the late 1800s, when the cemetery was covered over as the city grew.
The site is now being reclaimed as the Pine Street African Burial Ground, one of many forgotten or neglected African American burial grounds that are gaining renewed attention. Over the past three summers, the remains of as many as 27 people have been found there.
Lawyers in this Hudson River city bought a house that took up about half of the old cemetery a few years ago and are now using it as a visitors center. Money is being raised to transform the urban backyard into a respectful resting place. And while the names of those buried here may be lost, tests are planned on their remains to shed light on their lives and identify their descendants.
“The hardships of those buried here cannot simply be in vain,” said Tyrone Wilson, founder of Harambee Kingston, the nonprofit behind the project. “We have a responsibility to make sure that we address that disrespect.”
Although the more than half-acre (0.2 hectare) site was designated as a burial ground for enslaved people in 1750, it may have been in use earlier. Burials continued until about 1878, more than 50 years after New York City completely abolished slavery. Researchers say people were buried with their feet facing east so that they would face the rising sun when they rose on Judgment Day.
Remains found on the Harambee site are covered with patterned African cloths and stored where they are. Remains found on adjacent land are exhumed for later burial on the Harambee site.
Students from the State University of New York at New Paltz recently completed a third summer of guided backyard digs in this town 80 miles (129 kilometers) upriver from Manhattan. The students receive academic credit, though anthropology major Maddy Thomas said there is an overriding sense of mission.
“I don’t like it when people feel angry or forgotten,” Thomas said during a break. “And that’s what happened here. So we have to fix it.”
Harambee is seeking to raise $1 million to transform the modest backyard into a resting place that reflects the African heritage of the people buried there. Plans include a tall marker in the center of the yard.
Although some graves were marked, it is still difficult to tell who is buried there.
“Some of them were clearly marked with just a stone with no writing on it,” said Joseph Diamond, associate professor of anthropology in New Paltz.
The only intact gravestone with a visible name that was found was for Caesar Smith, who was born a slave and died a free man in 1839 at age 41. A researcher combed through historical documents and discovered two other people who may have been buried there in 1803: a man identified as Sam and a 16-year-old girl named Deyon, who publicly hanged after she was convicted of murdering her slave owners’ 6-year-old daughter.
In 1880 the cemetery was first covered by a sawmill, although some of the gravestones were apparently still standing at that time.
In 1990, Diamond was doing an archaeological survey for the city and saw that the cemetery was marked on a map from 1870. Together with the city historian, he went looking.
Coincidentally, the owner of the Pine Street building, Andrew Kirschner, had just discovered buried bone fragments while digging in front of the building for 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 starts and I say, ‘Well, let me show you what I found.’ Of course they were amazed,” said Kirschner, who owned the building next to the current Harambee site.
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. Lawyers bought the property in 2019.
Similar stories of neglect 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 are buried were buried until the 1790sIt was discovered in 1991 during excavations for a federal building. Further up the Hudson River, the renovation of a century-old schoolhouse into a courthouse in Newburgh led to the discovery of more than 100 sets of remains in 2008.
Antoinette Jackson, founder of The Black Cemetery Network, said many of the 169 locations listed on their list, online archive was erased.
“Many of them represent sites that have been built over — parking lots, schools, stadiums, freeways. Others have been under-resourced,” said Jackson, a professor of anthropology at the University of Southern Florida.
She added that the cemeteries listed in the archive are just the “tip of the iceberg.”
Given the thin historical record in Kingston, advocates hope that testing the remains will help fill in some of the gaps. Isotopic analyses could provide information about whether individuals grew up elsewhere — such as South Carolina or Africa — and then moved to the region. DNA analyses could provide information about where in Africa their ancestors came from. The DNA tests could also link them to living descendants.
Wilson said local families have committed to providing DNA samples, and he sees the testing as another way to connect people to heritage.
“One of the biggest problems we have in African culture is that we don’t know our history,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of information about who we are.”