On February 9, 1862, two days after she died, seventy-six-year-old Lucy Nichols was buried at Trinity Church Cemetery. Her connection to Trinity Church at Broadway and Wall Street was fairly long. In 1807, one of her sons was baptized there. And although she lived eight miles away in upper Manhattan, her many years as a communicant at St. Mary’s Protestant Episcopal Church of Manhattanville kept her in Trinity’s fold. Yet it probably came as no surprise even to Lucy Nichols—whose many years as a town midwife and a family matriarch had taught her a thing or two—that her last resting place would be in the cemetery’s “Colored Ground.”
Racially Segregated Burials
Trinity Church Cemetery’s array of lots and vaults included a “Parish Ground” for the use of the Parish of Trinity Church, and a “Church Ground” for the interment of persons not of the parish. Yet throughout the 19th-century New York City area, racially segregated burials were the socially sanctioned norm.
During the eighteen years straddling the American Civil War, between 1853 and 1871, the burials of at least twenty-eight African-Americans (including one African-born boy from Liberia) were recorded in a racially segregated public plot of Trinity Church Cemetery’s Easterly Division. The section was called variously the “Ground for the Colored,” “Colored Ground,” “Colored Lot” or “Colored Orphan Lot.”
Apart from the burial record, this segregated burial ground’s precise boundaries and administration are vague and no doubt nuanced. But a particular city ordinance, and a subsequent measure by one of New York’s oldest black churches, might shed some light on why it was established when it was.
In 1851, the city prohibited all burials below 86th Street. The new prohibition stuck St. Philip’s Episcopal Church with a deed to its lots on Christie Street that now carried an impossible clause: the property was mandated be used forever as a burial ground. Wishing to sell the property so as to buy another cemetery in Williamsburg, St. Philip’s successfully appealed to the Board of Aldermen in March 1853. By June, the first recorded interment in Trinity Church Cemetery’s “Ground of the Colored” may well indicate a change brought on by the city’s new burial policies.
Racially segregated grounds were not unique to Trinity Church Cemetery. Even by the 1890s, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported the practice of discrimination at “Greenwood, Evergreens, Cypress Hills and Union. In each of these a section is set apart for the burial of negroes.”
Colored Orphan Asylum Given Free Burials
In early 1864, managers of the Colored Orphan Asylum asked “to have children, who may die from the Asylum, buried in the Trinity Church Cemetery.” At the time it was incorporated in 1838, the Asylum had been removing its dead to the new cemetery across the river in Brooklyn. The managers remarked that “it would be much more agreeable to have them all laid together, in the nice plot kindly given us by Trustees of Greenwood Cemetery.” But they conceded that being now in the immediate neighborhood of Trinity Church Cemetery—which by this date was Manhattan’s only permissible burial ground—would “materially lesson the expense.”
Trinity Church acknowledged “the peculiar circumstances of the case”—born out of the previous summer’s notorious Draft Riots, when a mob of whites had burned the building to the ground—and agreed that “permission be granted to the Colored Orphan Asylum during the three years next succeeding this date to bury the bodies in Trinity Church Cemetery.” Burials within the lots were offered “free of all expenses except for the opening of graves.”
Yet like the exact location of the Colored Ground, the site of the Colored Orphan Asylum lot remains uncertain. The 1864 Vestry minutes referring to the latter grant—if it was one and the same as, or adjacent to, the Colored Ground—state that “burials shall be made only in such place as shall be designated by the said committee.” But they do not specify where.
Communal Plots For Other Groups
The cemetery provided communal plots to other eleemosynary organizations, too. Their names, many of which sound out of the ark today, included the Orphan Asylum Society (distinct from the Colored Orphan Asylum), House of Mercy, Association for the Relief of Respectable Aged Indigent Females, New York School for the Deaf, New York Institute for the Blind, Protestant Episcopal Mutual Benefit Society and several others.
But the New York Juvenile Asylum at176th Street, a mile north of the cemetery was of poignant interest.
On a summer morning in 1860, about a hundred boys filed down from the New York Juvenile Asylum to a convenient swimming hole in the Hudson River. The water was considerably shallow there, nevertheless John C. Freeman, a nine year old from England, still waded out too far. Three of Freeman’s comrades—Henry Huff, 14, of New Jersey, John Caton, 11, of New York, and William H. Holly, 14, of Westchester—rushed out in a vain effort to save him. But all four boys sank together.
Freeman’s recovered body was buried in Trinity Cemetery’s Church Ground. Huff and Holly, while wards of the same institution and victims of the same “painful occurance”, the two were interred according to social custom in the separate Colored Ground. But their stay there may have been short-lived.
Unknown Outcome Of The Colored Ground
In 1871, the last burial in the Colored Ground was recorded. At the same time, preparations were underway to extend Broadway through the cemetery, a plan that involved the erection of a suspension bridge between the grounds’ Easterly and Westerly divisions. Workmen set about relocating graves from the imminently widening thoroughfare.
By 1911, the 40-year-old suspension bridge was about to give way to a newly built Church of the Intercession within the cemetery. The New York Times reported the relocation of “between twenty and thirty graves from the [Easterly Division’s] northwest corner of Broadway and 155th Street,” as workers dug out the new church’s foundation. Mysteriously, several of the coffins were empty.
According to the Times, a Trinity representative suggested that careless workmen during the previous extension of Broadway had, “in order to conceal the resultant confusion… buried empty coffins, so that the new graves might agree in number with the old.”
Was this the former Colored Ground? No telling primary evidence has emerged as yet. The coincidences of the general “Church Ground” location (where other charitable plots lie) in that vicinity of the cemetery, as well as the correspondence of the last recorded burial and construction dates, are intriguing. So, too, is the question of Lucy’s son, Peter Nicolls, Jr., whose place of burial at Trinity Cemetery in 1871 is recorded in the parish register of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, but not in the cemetery’s register of Colored Ground interments. For now, there is still uncertainty.
And, too, some unintended irony. Since the footprint of the Church of the Intercession has evolved into a predominantly African-American church, it may well be resting upon the former Colored Ground.
Perhaps inevitably, the 19th-century standards of burial at Trinity Church Cemetery and elsewhere captured the zeitgeist of their time. For the boys Huff and Holly, as with Lucy Nichols and many others, eternal rest would also mean a separate peace until a later day.
Sources:
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “Where The Color Line Exists—No Equal Rights in Some of the Cemeteries,” December 7, 1890, p. 3.
Colored Orphan Asylum—Minutes of Board Meeting July 25, 1863 – December 7, 1874.
Vestry Minutes, January 11, 1864.
New York Times, “The Drowning of the Juvenile Asylum Boys,” July 16, 1860, p. 8.; “Empty Graves In Trinity Cemetery,” April 4, 1911.
Register, Trinity Church Cemetery, Manhattanville, 1843-1865, p. 183.
Parish Records, Burials, St. Mary’s P.E. Church Manhattanville.
Eric K. Washington - Eric K. Washington is the author of Manhattanville: Old Heart of West Harlem and contributed to the recent MTA-licensed guide book, New ...
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