THE HISTORY OF
SLAVE BURIALS

While one might assume that Negroes were necessarily buried alongside other Negroes in our region, such does not appear to always have been the case.  Religious considerations were a factor, and these factors can often be shown to have dictated burial locations.

By way of example, we look to the "God's Acre" Moravian cemetery at Bethlehem.  There, one notes that the cemetery was divided into sections that accorded with the Moravian Choirs, a segregated communal living system that was based on sex, age, and marital status.

Therein we find sections specific to men and women that are differentiated by rows:  rows for married men, for single men, for boys; also separate rows for married women, single women, and little girls.  Within these rows are to be found the resting places of slaves:

• Daniel, 1743-1753, a Negro boy who did faithful service in the nursery, is to be found in Little Boys row VI.

• Christian Gottfried, alias London, 1731-1756, a negro slave from Guinea who worked as a tanner, is to be found in the Unmarried Men and Boys row VII.

• Cornelia, 1728-1757, a mulatto slave girl belonging to the Horsfields, is to be found in the Unmarried Women and Girls row II.

Of course, Moravians resided throughout the area, with Nicholas Schoonover having been the patriarch of that given community within the local Walpack region (an area in close proximity to Nicholas Dupui's general store). 

As such, we have to look askance at recent efforts to describe a grouping of over 50 unmarked crude gravestones in the Walpack area as necessarily being a "Black/Slave Cemetery."  A large number of unmarked gravestones could equally be indicative of a massacre site, and we are well aware that both local Fort Hyndshaw and local Fort Walpack fell prey to massacre events on June 15th, 1758.

It should be noted that Dupui's ledger contains but one relevant entry -- Hugh Pugh in 1753 was paid six shillings for "making a Coffin for the Negro Wench."