A few weeks ago, Jerry and I successfully moved all of our belongings (and our two kitties) from Vestal to Middletown in preparation for my adventures in student teaching this fall. I must admit that I have been feeling a little restless ever since we arrived. I have been racking my brain, trying to think of interesting - and inexpensive - ways to pass the time in-between working on my future lesson plans. Thankfully, I remembered that my brother-in-law gave me a rather awesome gift for Christmas a couple of years ago...Chris Gethard's Weird NY.
I decided to flip through the book in the hopes of finding someplace relatively close by where I could visit. I was rather excited to find, under the section on "cemeteries," that there was a small, hidden cemetery located in the middle of the parking lot for the Palisades Shopping Center in West Nyack, NY. Now, Jerry and I have been to the Palisades Center a few times and not only had I never seen this mysterious cemetery, but I had never even heard of it before, which surprised me because this is the sort of thing I find fascinating (don't judge me, you know it's cool).
I convinced Jerry to go seek out the cemetery with me this afternoon. Thankfully, we share many of the same weird interests, so he jumped on the bandwagon pretty quickly. Besides, it also gave us the opportunity to go see Wes Anderson's fabulous new movie, Moonrise Kingdom, which I highly recommend, but that is another story for another day!
We arrived at the Palisades with nothing more to go on other than that the cemetery was located near the back end of the mall. We drove around to the back and decided to park and continue the search on foot. Jerry's detective skills must be more honed then mine because he almost instantly located a service road that led to a wooded area which was conspicuously fenced off (I on the other hand was still trying to orient myself in relation to the Barnes and Noble). Peeking over the fence, we saw...gravestones! American flags! Yay, success!
We looked around for an "official" entrance we could go through, with no success. There appeared to be a chained gate on the far side of the cemetery, but there was also a security guard down there...and neither of us felt like outrunning mall cops on such a nice day. So we did the only logical thing we could think of and snuck through a hole on our side of the fence into the back of the cemetery.
My first thought was...well my first thought was that I should not have worn heels. But my second thought was that there were quite a few American flags and veterans' plaques positioned around the graves. I had assumed that the cemetery was of some historical importance (or else I sincerely doubt that our benevolent corporate overlords would have agreed to build their supermall around it), and this new evidence seemed to confirm my assumption!
Jerry and I made our way around the back half of the cemetery. Most of the graves were extremely worn away and it was difficult to make out the inscriptions.
However we did see a few dates of death ranging from the late 1850s to the early 1900s. I also noticed one gravestone was marked with a weeping willow tree. Thanks to my archaeological background (yes, knew this would come in handy one day) I was able to recognize that this was a common pattern from the mid-1800s in this area.
So, to re-cap the evidence (some of which was more concrete than others): 1) the cemetery was allowed to remain standing, despite the fact that one of the largest shopping malls in the US was about to be built on the site, 2) American flags and veterans plaques surrounded the place, 3) some of the gravestones suggested that individuals buried in the cemetery died between the middle of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century...we concluded that this was a historic landmark, probably being preserved by NYS, most likely holding the remains of soldiers from the Civil War or the Spanish-American War. How exciting!
There appeared to be some sort of sign near the aforementioned chained gate which most likely explained in detail who was buried in the cemetery but the dreaded mall cops were still circling in that area, so Jerry and I were forced to sneak out the back way without getting a chance to read it. However, I of course wanted to learn a bit more about our lovely find so after returning home I immediately turned to the all knowing google for answers.
It turns out that the cemetery is even more fascinating than I had supposed! The Mount Moor Cemetery, established in 1849 to provide a final resting place for people of color, particularly African-Americans, who served in the United States Armed Forces during the years of the Civil War and Spanish-American War (got that part right at least...whew). In later years, veterans of other wars, including WWI & II and even the Korean War were buried there as well. I suppose these later grave sites were located near the front gate.
So now, I feel slightly less restless, having had a little adventure uncovering history hidden in plain sight.
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