Signing on to Seneca Village

Hunter Research, with the expert assistance of graphic designer Douglas Scott, has just recently concluded a year-long project assisting the Central Park Conservancy in developing historic interpretive signage for the site of Seneca Village, a predominantly African-American settlement occupied from the mid-1820s up until the time when Central Park was created in the late 1850s. A three-sided kiosk, three introductory signs and a network of 16 free-standing panels were installed and unveiled in mid-October, informing the public of the former existence of this once-vibrant community. These signs are a gentle reminder for Central Park visitors that there was life on this land before Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux got their designer hands on this section of Manhattan for the benefit of modern New Yorkers.

Training Future Archaeologists at the William Trent House

Over the summer of 2019, Hunter Research, in partnership with the Monmouth University Department of History and Anthropology, with funding support from NJM Insurance, and on behalf of the Trent House Association, organized a highly successful and productive archaeology field school on the grounds of the William Trent House in the heart of historic Trenton. Undergraduate students working for credit and hand-picked volunteers from NJM Insurance learned the craft of archaeological excavation and documentation on one of the richest sites in the Delaware Valley. A trove of Native American, European Contact period and early historic artifacts were recovered from a four-foot-deep sequence of deposits in front of the house and on the site of the adjoining mid-18th-century kitchen wing. Visitors came from near and far to learn of the fascinating discoveries made. Plans are afoot to mount a second season of the field school in 2020.

Rutgers Respectfully Redisposes of the Dead

In downtown Newark on Halsey Street, in the shadow of the Prudential Tower, Rutgers University through the agency of RBH Project, LLC is nearing completion of its new Honors Living-Learning Center. This major addition to the Rutgers-Newark campus, bounded by Washington, New, Halsey and Linden Streets, encompasses almost an entire block in the city’s historic core and lies within the James Street Commons Historic District. In the center of the block there used to be a cemetery associated with the Halsey Street Methodist Episcopal Church, Newark’s first Methodist house of worship, established in 1808-09.  Interments were made in the cemetery from early in the 19th century until around 1870.  In the 1920s, all burials were supposedly removed to make way for a parking lot for the nearby Hahne’s department store. 

As so often happens, the disinterment of bodies from abandoned cemeteries was haphazard and far from complete.Over the course of ten months in 2017, Hunter Research painstakingly removed no less than 335 burials, including 138 largely complete skeletons, many jumbled reinterments (including a group of children in a single box) and several partial disinterments (left-overs from the 1920s parking lot episode).In September 2018, after exhaustive analysis in the Hunter Research and Monmouth University laboratories, all human remains were transported to Hollywood Cemetery in Union, New Jersey and ceremonially reburied.A report on this complex archaeological endeavor, one of very few comprehensively reported cemetery excavations in New Jersey, was completed in the spring of 2019 and is available here.