Brooklyn's Forgotten Burial Grounds Hold Hundreds of Unmarked Graves

Brooklyn is running out of room for its dead, and the history of where residents were buried is fading with it. The city's population reached 2.6 million people, double the 1.2 million recorded when Brooklyn joined New York City in 1898. Washington Cemetery, a Jewish burial ground in Midwood, ran out of plots in 2008. Funeral directors there began unloading coffins in the street and carrying them in by foot when parking lots and roadways were converted into gravesites.

The Rural Cemetery Act of 1849 barred new burial grounds inside city limits, pushing cemeteries into then-undeveloped parts of Kings County. Established that same year, Washington Cemetery grew into five gated sections split by Bay Parkway, and it now holds more than 200,000 people. James Arlington Bennet, a lawyer and author, founded a cemetery on his estate in the 1840s and incorporated it as Washington Cemetery in 1850. He advertised it as the "cheapest in the state." The site was consecrated as a Jewish cemetery in 1857 and holds plots belonging to at least 30 burial societies. Those societies pooled dues from members to pay for plots, headstones, coffins, and other final expenses, a precursor to modern funeral insurance.

Other sites from the period hold different histories. A two-acre Navy hospital cemetery was established in 1831 on the eastern edge of the naval hospital campus, and more than 2,000 people were buried there between 1831 and 1910, including two Congressional Medal of Honor recipients. Records show at least 10 percent were African Americans. The site was closed to new burials in 1910, and in 1926 the Navy had the remains moved to Cypress Hills Cemetery.

When the Navy turned the Yard over to New York City in the 1990s, records showed 987 people were reinterred in Cypress Hills. Hundreds of burials remain unaccounted for. The area is now the Greenway Botanical Garden at the Naval Cemetery, a public nature preserve and meadow with more than 50 species of native plants. A raised boardwalk was built so visitors can cross the meadow without disturbing graves below. The site's tenth anniversary was marked this summer.

Quakers bought a hilltop plot near the Flatbush border in 1849 and began reintering their dead from Wallabout Cemetery by 1851. The plot sits inside the 585 acres of Prospect Park, which opened unfinished in 1867, and it remains private property owned by the New York Quarterly Meeting. Over 3,500 people are buried in the 10 acres. Early Quakers barred headstones as a sign of vanity; simple markers were permitted starting in the 1850s. Burials include Raymond Ingersoll, a former Brooklyn borough president for whom the NYCHA Ingersoll Houses are named, and Mary McDowell, a schoolteacher fired for refusing to sign a World War I loyalty oath. The Friends School in Brooklyn bears her name.

Elizabeth D. Meade identified hundreds of burial sites across the five boroughs through her PhD dissertation, scouring religious and official records, maps, and other materials. Her work is cataloged on the Cemeteries of New York City website.