Amelia Brown was 26 years old when she died in Philadelphia in 1819. No one today knows who she was, how she lived, or whether she was married or had children.
All we have is her headstone, which had been buried in the topsoil beneath a playground surface in a section of Philadelphia called Queen Village. It’s a few blocks south of Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, which owned the long-forgotten burial ground.
Archaeologists found her headstone and a few other artifacts during a preliminary search of the site over the past few months. They were charged with locating the perimeters of the cemetery and its graves before renovations could proceed on the Weccacoe playground. They didn’t dig deep enough to disturb coffins or bodies or whatever else is left of the dead after nearly 200 years.
Brown’s headstone was an easy pick.
“Hers was the only headstone fragment we found,” said Doug Mooney, senior archaeologist with the firm URS, which was hired by the city to do the study (the company also did the excavation of slave quarters at the President’s House some years ago in Philadelphia). Hers “was contained in a layer of fill. It had been broken off. We happened to get a piece floating free in the naked soil.”
Mooney was one of about a half-dozen people on a panel Sunday to offer information and answer questions about the Mother Bethel burial ground. This site was significant because Mother Bethel is historic: It is one of the first African American churches established in this country, co-founded by the Rev. Richard Allen in 1791.
This burial ground, too, is likely one of the oldest built especially for African Americans, who as Mooney noted were normally buried in potter’s fields all over the city. Potter’s fields were the graveyards where cities buried their poor, unclaimed and indigent – and apparently black – people.
The Mother Bethel cemetery may have been a blessing in its early years but had long been lost. It’s not much unlike the burial ground for black New Yorkers and other African Americans that was discovered in 1991. From the 1690s to 1794, blacks were buried at the site in Lower Manhattan, now designated the African Burial Ground National Monument. Both are among a number of black cemeteries across the country, some known and many more likely never to be unearthed.
Mother Bethel’s Rev. Mark Tyler said a few of his parishioners knew about the Bethel Burial Ground, as it was called, but most folks didn’t, including the neighbors whose children found joy at the playground.
The burial ground was as little known as the life of Amelia Brown. Hers is not among the 1,500 graves that historian Terry Buckalew has documented through death certificates. He’s the one who rediscovered the cemetery about seven years ago while working on a film project.
“Who knows who she was,” said Tyler. “Her being anonymous is … cool. We can make up our own story about her.”
Brown’s broken headstone carried only the date she died, her age and an inscription: “Whosoer lives & believeth in me thou we be dead yet shall we live.”
Buckalew noted that she was born in the midst of the yellow fever epidemic, which killed 5,000 of the city’s 45,000 to 50,000 residents in 1793.
During that epidemic, Allen and Mother Bethel cofounder Absalom Jones were among the African Americans who helped with the sick and dying. By then, Allen had become an important preacher and leader, boasting a church whose membership was growing and creating social programs within it to aid his own people.
While the cemetery may have slipped into oblivion, the church itself has not. It is as much a tourist attraction in Philadelphia as the Liberty Bell. Its basement is a spotless museum that testifies to its history, and holds the consecrated bodies of both Allen and his wife Sarah.
Mother Bethel was founded after Allen, Jones and other black congregants left the white St. George’s Methodist Church when they were told – after helping to renovate the church – that the upper section had been set aside for them. Mother Bethel was built in 1791 and began as St. Thomas African Episcopal Church, the founders choosing a denomination that was more hospitable to black congregants.
Finally, it became Methodist when a new church was built in another location in 1794 (it also served as a stop on the Underground Railroad). By the early part of the 1800s, it was renamed Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Allen helped to form a conference of black Methodist Episcopals and became its first bishop.
The plot for the cemetery was purchased in 1810 for $1,600 by Allen and trustees of Mother Bethel. In 1869, the cemetery land was rented out to a company to store its wagons. The graves were not to be disturbed, as part of the agreement, according to Buckalew’s research.
Allen “wanted parents and children buried together and not put in the trenches (in potter’s field),” Buckalew said, “… to make sure those living knew where their ancestors were.”
In 1872, Bishop Benjamin Tucker Tanner, father of artist Henry Ossawa Tanner, admonished parishioners for allowing the cemetery to deteriorate. It apparently also had been rented out as a dumping ground for waste among its broken headstones and disrepair. There were also subsequent external complaints about the lack of upkeep, according to Buckalew’s research.
“Bishop Tanner was furious with the congregation because of the state of the cemetery,” Tyler said. “The neglect didn’t start with the city of Philadelphia. People who lived there and parents were buried there didn’t care. That’s one of the stories we have to talk about and Mother Bethel has to own. This is the time to go back and do right by them.”
An 1889 article in the Philadelphia Tribune noted that the last burial was in 1864, according to Buckalew’s research. The cemetery land was sold to the city of Philadelphia to be used as a park/square for $10,000 that year. By then, there was no headstones or other indication that it was the site of an African American burial ground.
Buckalew is a historian of 19th-century African American history and primarily compiles historical databases. He had initially planned to use his research to aid African Americans searching their genealogical roots, he said in an interview. Then he learned that Weccacoe playground was scheduled for renovations, and he alerted folks about what was beneath it.
He’d come by the location of the burial ground by chance himself. He was doing consulting work on a film project about 19th-century activists Octavius V. Catto and Caroline Le Count when he first read of her family members buried there. He’d never heard of the cemetery, so he started digging through Mother Bethel and the city of Philadelphia archives. He found nothing.
“I assumed it had been lost in history,” he said in an interview. “It had been forgotten.”
But he kept searching and found death certificates from 200 years ago that mentioned the Bethel Burial Ground, and scraps of brown paper bags with little notes on them. By the time he finished he had 1,500 people by name, age, death date, occupation, where they lived, and more, he said during the panel discussion. He estimated that there are about 3,000 graves on the site.
Mooney and his team did not dig deep enough to disturb any graves. Their excavation determined that the top level was fill or topsoil used by the city in the md-19th century to level out its hills and valleys, to make the city flatter, he said. That fill, he noted, also created additional space for burials.
Brown’s headstone, some pottery pieces and other small artifacts got trapped in it, and were on display during the discussion.
The archaeology team was trying to determine how far down they could go before they reached the graves; they found that the coffins were one foot to 2½ feet below the fill and “the original ground surface of the cemetery,” Mooney said. The archaeologists also found the north and east walls of the cemetery.
They determined that there were grave shafts and intact wooden coffins. “The vast majority seem to be well-preserved below the surface,” Mooney said.
The archaeological firm will produce a report on its findings and changes are likely to be made to the renovations at the playground. Buckalew said the report would likely be ready by the end of August.
The burial ground takes up about one-third of the site, beneath a community/recreation center away from the playground and tennis courts. It is now on the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places, meaning any changes to it must be approved by the city’s Historical Commission, Mooney said.
A key question is how to commemorate the cemetery. Michael Coard, a founding member of Avenging The Ancestors Coalition, suggested something prominent and conspicuous. “Consecration not desecration,” he said. Tyler mentioned that since it was part of a playground, the acknowledgment should make an impression on the children who use it.
Buckalew noted that the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian, set to open in 2015, has the original 1810 deed to the burial ground. It was donated by a woman who bought it at a flea market in North Carolina, he said in an interview.
“What’s missing is the burial registry for Mother Bethel,” he added. “It disappeared in the 1850s.”
He mentioned that to me in hopes that I’ll come across it someday at an auction. I truly hope I do.
Meanwhile, Mother Bethel accepts church-related donations to its archives.
