Unknown Internments - St. Paul's Church National Historic Site - Mt. Vernon, NY - Graves of the Unknown on Waymarking.com

This marker is found in the cemetery at St. Paul's Church National Historic Site.

It reads:

This marker memorializes approximately 680 internments, mostly infants, buried in trench graves in this section of the St. Paul's Cemetery from 1892 to 1939.

From an NPS website:

"Burials on the City side increased greatly in the 1890s, and interments included many citizens of Mt. Vernon who were not parishioners of St. Paul’s. Families paid a fee to the City for the right to bury loved ones, including Dr. Charles S. Taft, one of the attending surgeons at the Lincoln assassination of 1865. He lived in Mt. Vernon briefly at the end of his life and passed away in 1900. However, by the early 1920s, the area had become increasingly used as a potter’s field, or a burial yard for people who needed public assistance for interment. Use of the area in this manner had existed since at least 1910, reflected in the document on this panel. Many of these interments were very young children, born to families of limited incomes, who died shortly after birth, at a time when infant mortality was still a serious problem in much of America. Others were people who died in local accidents or other circumstances, with no identification, and had to be buried under City jurisdiction. There were eventually 680 burials in these trench graves -- several coffins interred in a large pit, or a trench.

Objections to the trench burials and the potter’s field emerged in the 1930s from the church side under Rev. Harold Weigle, who was developing his conception of the church and grounds as a special national historic shrine. These trench burials seemed to downgrade the significance of the site. The church vehemently argued that the potter’s field also created a public health crisis, with multiple coffins stacked in an increasingly overused section. Efforts to reach agreement with the City failed, and the church began a series of lawsuits, reaching State Supreme Court. St. Paul’s was seeking to end the practice of trench burials and use of the area as a pauper’s field. The legal drama included court-ordered ground probes to determine how many trench burials there were.

The controversy attracted public and local newspaper attention. Fearing a spectacle and unwanted publicity, the probes were conducted at undisclosed times, in secret - at dawn or dusk. The city and the church even disagreed over the results of the probes, with Mt. Vernon clinging to the idea that there remained sufficient room to continue the potter’s field burials. Ultimately, the City agreed with the courts that the trench burials were too numerous, and they ended in 1939. In addition to the tales of spirits and ghosts, the end of those trench burials marked an important development in recognizing the grounds as special and important, helping to build the case for national historic site status."

source: (visit link)

Burial Location: St. Paul's Church National Historic Site Available Times for Viewing: Grounds are open sunrise - sunset

Visit Instructions:
Take a picture of the headstone. A waymarker and/or GPSr is not required to be in the image.

Recent Visits/Logs:

There are no logs for this waymark yet.