Carpenter Cemetery

Source: The Cemeteries of Westchester County, Vol. III, Patrick Raftery, Westchester County Historical Society, 2011.

Location: 150 Stratton Road, New Rochelle, NY. North side of Stratton Road between the driveway for the Saint Nersess Armenian Seminary and the Iona Preparatory School athletic fields (about four-tenths of a mile east of Wilmot Road).

Dates of Activity: 1838 —1905.

Joseph Carpenter was an "old Quaker gentlemen" who owned a farm which during the mid-19th century stretched westward from Weaver Street to the present site of the Saint Nersess Armenian Seminary. Mr. Carpenter served as the executor of the will of Joseph Thomas Turpin, a former slave who owned a parcel on Pelham Road that had once been used by Trinity Church as a cemetery for African Americans. Perhaps through his connection with Mr. Turpin, Joseph Carpenter realized the need for a proper burial place for the black citizens of New Rochelle and its surrounding area. To solve this problem, he donated an acre of his land for use as a cemetery for African Americans in a 1838 deed transferring the land to several municipalities in southern Westchester County, namely, New Rochelle, Mamaroneck, Scarsdale and Eastchester.

Aaron M. Powell, a prominent Quaker and member of the Anti-Slavery Society, commented on Mr. Carpenter's commitment to providing a suitable burial place for the black citizens of southeast Westchester:
There was much prejudice against colored people in this region, so much, that at that time in New Rochelle colored people were denied burial in any of its cemeteries or burial places. To meet this difficulty Joseph Carpenter set apart a portion of one of the fields of his [New Rochelle] farm as a burial plot for the colored people. By his direction his own body was interred therein. I visited him a short time previous to his death, when he acquainted me with this arrangement for the disposition of his body, as a last testimony against the then prevailing - and, alas, still prevalent - unchristian color prejudice. In accordance with his wish I also attended his funeral, and to those assembled bore my testimony to his memory and great personal worth. It was an occasion long to be remembered. His body, clothed in his wonted plain Friendly costume, was placed for burial, as he had also directed, in a plain, unstained pine coffin. At the conclusion of the services the coffin was carried out upon the lawn, in the shade of the trees he loved so well, and then those in attendance, colored and white, gathered about it to take a last look at the face of him whom they loved and reverenced. Then it was borne by colored men, who had requested the privilege, to its final resting place, among those of the proscribed colored people whom he had befriended. At a later period the body of Margaret Carpenter, the wife, a woman of sterling worth, sharing fully the deep feeling of her husband concerning the great injustice from which the colored people, both bond and free, were sufferers, was also interred in this unique, and now historic, burial plot.
In 1889 George T. Davis noted that the number of burials in the cemetery "average[d] about 10 per year."" Among those interred in the Carpenter Cemetery was Mrs. Carrie Gifelt (b.1848), whose funeral procession on April 21, 1896, attracted a considerable amount of interest:
[Mrs. Gilfert] was a devout Christian lady, and a member of the Ladies Aid Society of the [A.M.E.] church.... Six members of the Ladies Aid Society, attired in long mourning gowns of black and white, officiated as pall-bearers, and escorted her remains to the Church and thence to the Upper New Rochelle Colored Cemetery.... This is the first occasion in New Rochelle of an adult's funeral attended by female pall-bearers, and was quite a novelty to the spectators who witnessed the funeral en-route to the cemetery.
The farm which bordered the east side of this cemetery remained in the hands of the Carpenter family until 1906, when Phila Jane Carpenter sold the parcel to Francis A. Stratton. This transaction caused some concern among the friends and relatives of those who were interred there, as was noted by the New York Times:
President F.A. Stratton of the Westchester Lighting Company, who recently paid $65,000 for a farm on the Wilmot Road in Upper New Rochelle, finds that he is also the possessor of a negro cemetery with 400 graves in it.... The last burial there was that of a white woman who had a negro husband. She was buried a week ago. The negroes of New Rochelle are very much concerned because they have heard that Mr. Stratton intends to build a mansion on the place, which will mean that the cemetery will be wiped out and the gravestones raised. The negroes have no control over the graveyard because the man who deeded the property to them named a board of trustees, and the last member of the original board of trustees died twenty years ago. Mr. Stratton is in Maine on his vacation, and a gang of men is clearing the land for building purposes.
These fears were unsubstantiated as the deed for Mr. Stratton's property noted that his purchase did not include the graveyard. Nevertheless, this transaction marked the end of the Carpenter Cemetery's existence as an active burial ground. In 1939 Morgan Seacord noted that the "earliest known stone" in the Carpenter Cemetery "is that of James Tudor, 1839. The names of others suggest retainers of early white families of New Rochelle, among whom are Landrine, Bonnet, Pugsley, and Bailey."2 Unfortunately, the condition of the cemetery deteriorated in the first half of the 20th century, a fact that was noted by the DAR in their 1940 survey of burial grounds in New Rochelle:
The cemetery is in a most neglected state at the present time. There are many stones, set up in rows, most of them plain field stones without marks. A number of small stones have initials on them. The only stone with an inscription at present standing is a double stone to T. Cornelius [d.1901] and Eliza Bonnett [d.1899].

Sadly, the neglect mentioned above has continued to the present, as the cemetery is full of the "trees, brush, briars [and] noxious weeds" that Joseph Carpenter had empowered the superintendents of the burial ground to remove. There is no sign or marker to denote the cemetery's existence, and to the unknowing observer it appears to be nothing more than an overgrown patch of land.