KINGSTON, N.Y. (AP) — In a residential neighborhood in upstate New York, college students this summer dug and sifted through the dirt in their backyard as part of an archaeological exploration of a centuries-old African American burial ground.
Now covered in green grass in the city of Kingston, it was part of a cemetery for enslaved people in 1750. At that time, it was on the outskirts of the city. An unknown number of people who were denied burial in the churchyard were buried here until the late 19th century, when the cemetery was covered over as the city grew.
The site is now being redeveloped as the Pine Street African Burial Ground, one of many forgotten or neglected cemeteries for African Americans that is receiving new attention. Over the past three summers, the remains of up to 27 individuals have been found there.
Lawyers in this Hudson River town bought a residential property that occupies about half of the old cemetery a few years ago and now use the house as a visitor center. Funds are being raised to transform the urban backyard into a respectful resting place. And while the names of the people buried here have been lost, tests are planned on their remains to shed light on their lives and identify their descendants.
“The hardships of those buried here cannot go in vain,” said Tyrone Wilson, founder of Harambee Kingston, the nonprofit community group behind the project. “We have a responsibility to right this desecration.”
The more than half-acre (0.2 hectare) site was designated as a burial ground for enslaved people in 1750, though it may have been in use before then. Burials continued until about 1878, more than 50 years after New York abolished slavery. Researchers say people were buried with their feet facing east so they would be facing the rising sun when they awoke on Judgment Day.
Remains found on the Harambee property are covered with patterned African cloths and kept where they were found. Remains found on adjacent land are later exhumed for burial on the Harambee property.
Students from the State University of New York at New Paltz recently completed their third summer of supervised backyard excavations in this city 80 miles (129 kilometers) above Manhattan. The students receive course credit, but there is an overriding sense of mission, said Maddy Thomas, an anthropology major.
“I don’t like people to be upset or forgotten,” Thomas said during a break. “And that’s what’s happening here. So we’ve got to fix that.”
Harambee is trying to raise $1 million to transform the modest backyard into a resting place reflecting the African heritage of the people buried there. Plans include erecting a tall marker in the middle of the garden.
Although some of the graves appear to be marked, it is still difficult to tell who is buried there.
“It’s pretty clear that some of them were just marked with a stone with no writing on it,” said Joseph Diamond, an associate professor of anthropology at New Paltz.
The only intact headstone with a visible name belonged to Caezar Smith, who was born a slave and died a free man in 1839 at age 41. A researcher went through historical records and found 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 was publicly hanged for the murder of the slave owners’ 6-year-old daughter.
The cemetery was originally covered by a lumber yard in 1880, although some of the headstones appeared to still be standing at that time.
While conducting an archaeological survey for the city in 1990, Diamond noticed the cemetery marked on a map from 1870. He and the city historian set out to find it.
Coincidentally, Andrew Kirschner, the owner of the Pine Street building, had discovered the buried bone fragments while digging in front of the building to look for a sewer pipe. He put the fragments in a box. Kirschner said he was still digging when Diamond told him what they were looking for.
“The conversation starts, and then I say, ‘Okay, let me show you what I found.’ Of course, they were very surprised,” says Kirschner, who owns the building next door to the current Harambee property.
Even after the discovery, Diamond said it was difficult to convince people there were graves on Pine Street. There were even plans to build a parking lot on much of the site in 1996. The advocates bought the property in 2019.
Similar stories of neglect and rediscovery have occurred elsewhere.
In Manhattan, the African Burial Ground National Monument marks the burial place of an estimated 15,000 free and enslaved Africans dating back to the 1790s. It was discovered in 1991 during excavations for a federal building. Up the Hudson River, in Newburgh in 2008, the conversion of a century-old school into a courthouse led to the discovery of more than 100 sets of remains.
The Black Cemetery Network founder Antoinette Jackson said most of the 169 sites listed in its online archives have been deleted.
“Many of these represent built-up areas — parking lots, schools, stadiums, highways — and others are under-resourced,” says Jackson, a professor of anthropology at the University of South Florida.
He added that the cemeteries in the archive were “just the tip of the iceberg.”
Given the scant historical record in Kingston, advocates hope that tests on the remains will help fill in some of the gaps. Isotopic analysis could provide information about whether individuals grew up elsewhere, such as South Carolina or Africa, and later moved to the region. DNA analysis could provide information about where in Africa their ancestors came from. DNA tests could also link them to living descendants.
Wilson said local families are committed to providing DNA samples. He sees the tests as another way to connect people to their 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 much of a grasp of who we are.”