The Cemetery on the Old Farm ... in Queens?

Staring down 54th Street from 31st Ave in Woodside, Queens, a street lined with boxy brick apartments and a scant bit of foliage, one would not expect to find one of the oldest cemeteries in New York nestled in amongst the buildings...

But there it is, halfway down the block: the Moore-Jackson Cemetery, founded in 1733 (276 years ago) and a rare surviving example of a colonial graveyard in Queens.

While doing research on the Marble Cemetery on Second Ave, I came across a number of sites about the Moore-Jackson cemetery, which was once located on farmland belonging to the wealthy Moore family. I'm amazed by the idea that any part of a former Queens farm still exists to this day, much less an entire cemetery, and I had to take a look.

The cemetery is located halfway down the block on 54th Street btw. 31st & 32nd Avenues - you can see it in the below map as that grouping of trees. Though the cemetery entrance is technically on 51st Street, the area is immensely overgrown and no headstones are visible on that end. The entire graveyard is fenced and locked up, so you'll have to take pictures from the street.

The cemetery resides on former farmland once owned by the Moore family, of whom Clement Clarke Moore (author of The Night Before Christmas) is a descendant. The Moore farmland, established by Samuel and Charity Moore, covered 100 acres, including the cemetery and a farmhouse located nearby (torn down in the early 1900's, according to Forgotten-NY - check out their page for an excellent full history).  The Moore Cemetery added the Jackson name when one John Jackson married into the family.

The Moore family didn't always find itself on the right side of history: during the Revolutionary War, the family sided with the British and housed soldiers. Later, Clement Clarke Moore, a professor at Columbia, argued against abolition.

In the 1820's, the Moore farmland was sold off save for the cemetery, which was stipulated by will to remain as the family burial ground.

(pan - to see full size, click the picture, then click on All Sizes)

The earliest grave dates to 1733; the last, 1868. All in all, there were approximately 42 burials here, of which only 15 headstones remain. Sadly, the graveyard fell into decay, to the point where by the 1920's, the entire plot of land had become completely overgrown. Builders used the site as a garbage dump during the construction of the nearby apartment buildings, not realizing that headstones still remained. Many are now broken or illegible. Others have been moved.

The cemetery was restored after its rediscovery in the 1920's, then forgotten again, left to become further overgrown. In the 1970's, local residents uncovered it once more, and the cemetery has been looked after to varying degrees ever since. It received landmark status in 1997 - sorry, developers!

The oldest remaining grave visible from the street, dating to November 23, 1769 (240th anniversary is coming up), belonged to one Augustine Moore.

Another grave visible was for Margaret Moore, who died in 1790 just 1 year, 11 months old.

Another grave, this one belonging to Samuel Hallet Moore who died in 1813 at age 23:

This one farther back has been vandalized - someone wrote a name and "January 24, 1967" in marker...nice...

Others have faded or been destroyed.

There are three trees in the cemetery that I really like, small and gnarled, looking like claws reaching up from the ground:

Two of the trees up close:

You can see the posts of a fence, which probably once encircled the cemetery in a chain.

More posts:

And a few more posts:

I love the idea that this tree just south of the cemetery probably stood when the surrounding area was farmland...

The tree:

The entire rear of the cemetery is overgrown. According to The Queens Historical Society, the cemetery went through Phase 1 of a new restoration plan in June. They were looking for volunteers at the time, and I've emailed to see if Phase 2 is in the near future.

This is the 51st Street side, once the entrance to the cemetery. It's amazing to see such a large pocket of overgrown foliage in the middle of Queens.

My trusty bike poses in another view of the cemetery:

The entrance path:

This is the plaque on the 54th Street side...Come on, City of NY, can we do a little better??

If it's difficult for the Marble Cemetery in the middle of Manhattan to raise money for restoration, I can only imagine how hard it's been for the Moore-Jackson cemetery. It's unfortunate that the surrounding community hasn't risen to the challenge - the graveyard could be such a beautiful park if the desire and respect was there. I hope to help out at the next restoration phase, and will post info on it when I hear.

-SCOUT
www.scoutingny.com

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Comments

[Arielman]

Last month, over review of the NYC Landmarks Commmission, there was assisted the excavation of six (6) 5'x5'x9'+ units on a street in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn as part of the ongoing construction of a large pressure sewer (force main) there that I crewed on. They were concerned that there may have been a burial ground below 27th Avenue that was once an AME Zion church (African Methodist Episcopal, "Zion" to separate it, i.e., New York City rather than Philadelphia, PA). Lots of coal ash/trash from around the time they made Rikers Island, land-filled by 1903, it still, with a Queens causeway, in the Bronx jurisdiction from where the ferries left, but no evidence of burials and lots of evidence of a former marsh in south Brooklyn where Mr. Benson made his town.

[Arielman]

July and August 2000 I worked the Cooper Square Urban Renewal project, once proposed to tear down 25 blocks of NYC's Lower East Side. I co-authored research of the lots and histories in the Bowery, Manhattan, NY, i.e., parts of three blocks, two former cemeteries, some with standing structures, one housing Kate Millet, noted feminist, next-door to “Germania Hall” where Kate Mullaney, of Troy, NY, sitting with American feminist, Susan B. Anthony was elected to a union, a first.

A Quaker cemetery on Houston St. was moved to Old Westbury and on "Coney Island Road" now Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Outside our study, is a "Negroe Cemetery" on one map a few blocks south of Houston. Another lot on Bowery had been the "satellite" cemetrery of a Methodist church, located where today a former courthouse houses Anthology Film Archives. In construction of the courthouse (2nd Ave, 2nd St.) they discovered a burial, which required a special session of the NY legislature, determined it Dept. of Education's purview. Those proceedings were lost in a State Library fire, so only the results are known, and perhaps a precedent set, in need of further research as to how the legislature determined that result.

There are two Marble Vault cemeteries nearby, first nondenominational ones in the city in the former historic theater district. The Methodist cemetery was moved to Long Island, straddling Queens/Brooklyn it avoided the legislature which forbid any larger than 250 acres in any one county.

[Arielman]

Before working there, I worked in the summer of 1999 in the City Hall Park human remains found in construction and “restoration” designs for fixing the park, most thought in the "first Almshouse” cemetery, in the former Commons. I worked excavating around a two stacked burial found in the test unit dug in the planned location of a water-fountain, hopefully the fountain was moved, not far from the statue of Horace Greeley, who may also sit on some.

In the fall of 1999 I helped with The Old Soldiers Cemetery, West Farms, Bronx, NY, monitoring excavation for a new fence, bones recovered sent to Smithsonian for analysis. Street cutting and neighborhood development isolated former churchyard. Four wars (to WWI) of veterans are buried there. The stones were stood against each other their location awaiting some map, displaced by road and city planning (an aqueduct runs near it under land next to the west side of the Bronx River at 180th St. there, the church building removed to the north, where across the street is the Bronx Zoo. Also said to be one of the earliest city landmarks considered.

Quakers and Shakers never had headstones in their burials, here in New York and from my experience in Ohio, at the Watervliet Shaker community now a research park. Perhaps some of these stones were also stacked up either standing or leaning or laying flat and broken.

[LMPE]

Once when I went to NYC I saw the graves of my great-grandparents in a Queens neighborhood. The cemetery was organized according to the village from which people emigrated.

[Arielman]

I worked on the archaeology of this cemetery in June, 2000 with Celia Bergoffen, PhD, RPA for the Queens Historical Society. The family house was on a crossroads and was commandeered by the British Army. They were tried after the American Revolution and found innocent of collaboration. The info gathering and reporting allowed the British Army to win the "Battle of Long Island" against General George Washington.

The NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission requested and reviewed a then previous research report on it. We excavated a controlled archaeology unit in front of the standing headstones. The theory was that work in the WPA period had "reconstructed" or landscaped it, then next to a Japanese-American run garden supply business. Each of the stones turned out to have been broken, i.e., usually they project 2 feet into the ground, they appeared in profile to have been broken, and there were no "pit outlines" that would have suggested a human interment.

I suggested "remote sensing" ground-penetrating radar. It would be able to describe better the street-to-street lot and thereby perhaps find where the burials had actually been before the headstones were apparently "mowed down".

At the same time I recall, the NY Times, published a story that the "Night Before Christmas" might have had been prose "lifted" from an Upstate paper who included a similar story in their request for the subscribers to pay their bills and to remember the carriers of it that brought it to them.