Suburb uncovers hidden burial ground as NY studies centuries of African American history
The two-story homes in a quaint New York suburb sit atop the remains of people long buried in history.
In Irvington, New York’s Barney Park neighborhood, less than an hour from Manhattan, homes with multiple bedrooms and baths have recently sold for upward of $1.5 million.
More than a century ago, several homes were built on an orchard during New York’s suburban expansion into Westchester County.
And that orchard, records show, sat atop a burial site of enslaved African people. When Barney Park was being completed, news clippings also described residents digging up human remains.
Research by local residents has sought to understand the lives of those buried there.
“This is not the other-side-of-the-street, separate history from the typical Eurocentric history that rolls down every Main Street,” said Sarah Cox, a researcher and Irvington resident who, with journalist Cathy Sears, helped identify the site. “Enslaved people’s experiences have had a profound effect to African Americans living in what we know about as Westchester, but it’s everywhere. It’s a national problem.”
New York's newly formed Commission on African American History is looking to identify places and people often not included in dominant narratives about the state's development over four centuries. Barney Park's burial ground could be an example of such a site.
The commission acts in contrast to efforts to remove parts of U.S. history detailing slavery and racism in several states.
What's the purpose of NY's African American history commission?
Last March, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order establishing the commission to study 400 years of African American history in New York, beginning with the period when enslaved Africans were brought to present-day Virginia.
In early February, commissioners held their second meeting at Philipse Manor Hall in Yonkers, New York — the center of a once expansive Dutch manor that stretched from the Spuyten Duyvil in the Bronx to Croton-on-Hudson. By October, the commission plans to submit a report to the governor and the Legislature of its planned activities, findings and recommendations.
“We are not just a backwards-looking commission,” said New York Secretary of State Robert Rodriguez, the commission’s chair. “We also want to use that history as a context for future discussion.”
The commission could make recommendations related to school curriculum, community engagement and recognizing landmarks and places that have contributed to African Americans’ histories in New York, Rodriguez added. This project comes as state lawmakers consider a proposal establishing a commission to study reparations for Black New Yorkers — similar to efforts underway in California, as well as a decades-old congressional bill, H.R. 40.
'It's hidden in plain view'
At the commission's recent meeting, Bard College history professor Myra Young Armstead presented her findings chronicling the lives of enslaved people forced to work on land held by the Schuyler family outside Albany, New York, made famous for a Revolutionary War battle and in the Broadway musical "Hamilton."
Her research for a forthcoming book is part of a public project with the National Park Service and the Organization of American Historians about the Schuyler Mansion Historic Site.
Armstead studied records detailing hundreds of Kongo and Loango people captured in and near present-day Congo and brought to North America by the Schuylers. She dug into their contributions in the colonial era and after American Independence.
“It’s hidden in plain view,” Armstead said.
“We have the facts, but what does that mean?” she said. “That made me think about what we as a society remember, what we forget, why we forget, why we remember.”
How was Irvington's African American history uncovered?
Much like the Schuyler's land holdings, Irvington was comprised of tenant farms along the Hudson River.
Cox and Sears have sought to recognize the contributions enslaved African people had in shaping the village, which was more than 80% white as of the 2020 census. In 2019, they published findings identifying the names of people who were enslaved in what is now Irvington in the 18th and early 19th centuries.
After Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, their research helped result in commemorations honoring people once enslaved in the present-day village, including a statue depicting an enslaved girl outside of the local elementary school. The findings have also been taught in local workshops about how to talk about slavery.
Cox, Sears and another researcher, Chet Kerr, also identified the burial ground under Barney Park. Using estate inventories, census records and map surveys, they showed that Johannes Buckhout, a Dutch settler who has an Irvington street named after him, enslaved African people. He leased land to the Jewels, another enslaver family, where Barney Park now stands. Eventually, that property was sold.
Nineteenth century maps showed a greenhouse and orchard in the area, Cox, Sears and Kerr wrote in a report substantiating the burial site. In 1894, Charles Barney gave land to John Brisbane Walker, who then moved the Buckout and Jewel's old farmhouse the next year to build the Cosmopolitan Magazine Building nearby. Soon after, homes were built to create Barney Park, although human remains were being found as the neighborhood developed during the early 20th century, several articles in The Irvington Gazette reported, as the researchers found.
In the newspaper's June 29, 1928 edition, village historian Arthur Lord wrote about a "grave yard for colored people" east of Buckhout's house after it had been moved. He also cited a racist village fable about an enslaved woman walking past the burial ground.
In the same edition, the "Scoop's Column" said enslaved people lived on the farm. Some enslaved people were buried there, the columnist wrote. "The burying ground was discovered when Barney Park was opened." The columnist added that's "apparent why" roads and other developments went undisturbed for years.
The last part of the column, Cox, Sears and Kerr wrote in their report, indicated human remains had recently been discovered and residents were considering what to do about the burial ground.
In 1939, the Irvington Gazette reported on the graveyard, with an orchard later planted on it. People forgot about it until the area was developed and human remains were found, the article said.
It’s unclear how many people were once buried there, or how many bodies have been removed — and how many remain.
"Our town is your town," Sears said.
"It's all of America coming to recognize our full history," she added. "African American history is part of that. And enslaved and kidnapped people are part of that history."
The village of Irvington has planned a memorial garden across a small brook from Barney Park, on a small patch near a waterfall along Buckhout Street.
In September 2021, the area suffered severe damage from the remnants of Hurricane Ida. The proposed site is unusable, Village Administrator Larry Schopfer said. Just a few yards away, a new plot for the garden is being considered.
Other once forgotten NY cemeteries, remembered
Across Westchester, another African American cemetery has been preserved. In Rye, on the Long Island Sound, it lies down a small path along marshland, and it abuts the I-95 freeway.
The first recorded burial dates to 1840, of Sarah C. Smith, the child of Rufus and Susan Smith. Two decades after her death, in 1860, abolitionists Underhill and Elizabeth Halstead deeded the area, just slightly smaller than a football field, to the town of Rye for use as a cemetery for African Americans until 1964, when segregated burials ended. More than 300 people — among them veterans, clergy, nurses and motorcyclists from in and around Rye — now rest there.
Later in the 20th century, the cemetery fell into disrepair, with waist-high weeds that frightened one descendant quoted in a history of the site. Since 2003, it's been on the National Register of Historic Places. Local groups have worked to maintain the cemetery, including with small American flags planted next to each gravestone, as they were seen on a recent visit.
“Location is key to our understanding of history,” said David Thomas, president of the Friends of the African American Cemetery, the nonprofit that preserves the grounds. "There are lots of other stories at the site. Every year we go through, I found out more and more about the people who are buried here and what they've seen."
Another burial site near New York City Hall had tens of thousands of enslaved and free African people's bodies that were found when constructing a federal building. The site is now a national monument honoring them.
On Juneteenth, the state commission plans to meet in Buffalo. A challenge is bridging nearly 400 years of history of African Americans in New York.
The through-line is resilience, said Henry Louis Taylor Jr., a University at Buffalo professor of history and urban planning who is a member of the state commission.
“We know that the history of our people, at every specific moment, has centered on self-determination,” Taylor said. "The quest to control our own destiny, and the spaces and places where we reside.”
For now, Irvington's Barney Park has no markers of a burial ground. The neighborhood is only accessible through a narrow brick gate.
Near one home, withered vines drape over a faded brick wall. Those bricks are believed to be part of an old greenhouse. The orchard, where people were buried, is thought to be next door.
Eduardo Cuevas covers race and justice for the Paste BN Network of New York. He can be reached at EMCuevas1@gannett.com and followed on Twitter @eduardomcuevas.