By: Andrew I. Dalton, President & CEO, Gettysburg History
Few realize that beneath a quiet backyard on York Street lies the site of Gettysburg’s first African American cemetery.
Before the house at 311 York Street was built in the early 1900s, the property was filled with headstone marking the graves of some of Gettysburg’s most prominent Black residents. As historian Betty D. Myers explains in her book Segregation in Death: Gettysburg’s Lincoln Cemetery, members of the Black community purchased this lot in 1828 specifically to establish a burial ground.
Historic maps from 1850, 1858, and 1872 clearly show the York Street cemetery. During the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, Andrew Schick recalled that Confederate soldiers who died at St. James Lutheran Church were taken “to the colored graveyard and buried.” In 1868, Jack Hopkins, longtime janitor of Pennsylvania (now Gettysburg) College, was buried here following “one of the largest [funerals] witnessed here for years.”
In 1906, the congregation of St. Paul’s A.M.E. Church voted to abandon the cemetery and move identified graves to Lincoln Cemetery across town. A survey recorded the headstones still standing at the time, including those of Abraham Brian, a respected farmer who owned a farm near the site of Pickett’s Charge; Clara Diggs, a South Washington Street resident whose property was excavated by archaeologists in 2007; Civil War veterans John A. Disnick, John W. Watts, and John Redding; and Violet and Valentine Watts, parents of community leader and veteran Lloyd F.A. Watts.
Only 36 headstones were documented in 1906, but the cemetery had been active for roughly forty years—long enough for well over 100 burials. Like all abandoned cemeteries, many of the bodies were never moved.
Later that year, the Tipton family purchased the property. When construction began on their new two-story brick home, workers disturbed dozens of graves. Neighbor Bessie Lutz remembered that “bones were found—which were placed in a box [in] back of the stove & when dry were burned.” Whether rumor or fact, the account points to a likely desecration of human remains.
Today, little remains to mark the site. This burial ground, once the final resting place for many of Adams County’s earliest African American residents, has been almost completely forgotten. It deserves to be remembered, preserved, and properly marked—for history’s sake and for the dignity of those still resting beneath 311 York Street.
