Pell Family Burial Ground

Pell family burial ground, ca. 1900 (Weschester Co. Historical Society)

When I received a Pell Grant as an undergraduate pursuing an anthropology degree at the University of Arkansas in the early 1990s, I didn’t imagine that I would one day wander down a remote wooded path in the Bronx in search of a tiny cemetery where Pell ancestors are buried. Pell Grants are named in honor of former U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell (1918-2009), whose forefather Thomas Pell bought a large tract of wilderness from a council of Native American sachems in 1654. The British crown later granted Thomas Pell a royal charter for this 9,000-acre expanse, named the  Manor of Pelham, that covered parts of what is today the Bronx and Westchester County. With this land grant, the seed was planted from which grew a dynasty that has had far-reaching influence throughout American history.

Extract from a map of the colonial manors of Westchester county showing those that extended over what is today the Bronx and southern Westchester. The Manor of Pelham is at right, stretching along Long Island Sound; arrow indicates approximate location of the Pell family burial ground.

The Pell family burial ground is located just southeast of the Bartow-Pell mansion, built between 1836 and 1842 by Robert Bartow, a Pell descendant. The house and burial ground are on land that was part of the ancient Manor of Pelham and, except for a brief period, this property was in the hands of Pell descendants for 234 years before the city acquired it in 1888 to become part of Pelham Bay Park. Six tombstones dating from 1748 to 1790—including one for Joseph Pell (d. 1752), the Fourth Lord of the Manor of Pelham—are enclosed in this plot of roughly 100 square feet near the Sound at Pelham Bay. The cemetery’s location on ancestral land made the burial ground a venerated site for the Pell family; they added a large memorial stone in 1862 and a fence with inscribed granite posts in 1891.

After Thomas Pell died in 1669, his descendants began to sell off pieces of his manor and its acreage shrank. The American Revolution brought an end to the Pell lordship and manor—members of the family being Loyalists, they fled to Canada for British protection. They were disgraced and their property was confiscated. Their original manor house, located near where the Bartow-Pell mansion now stands, was burned. But their exile was temporary—once political passions cooled, the Pells returned to New York and resumed their prominent place in society.

Tombstones in Pell family burial ground, June 2014. The stone in the foreground marks the grave of Joseph Pell, Fourth Lord of the Manor, who died in 1752 (Mary French)

The old Pell cemetery has been a historical attraction since the city acquired it, and in 1905 was deemed “one of the most interesting nooks of the beautiful and immense Pelham Bay Park” by a local newspaper. The cemetery also has occasionally attracted visitors with nefarious intentions. Acting on a legend that says the plot contains gold and jewels hidden by the Pells, thieves have periodically tampered with the graves in their search for booty. One such case occurred in 1914 when police found a fresh hole dug five feet deep in the burial ground. Further evidence suggested that the bandits had been at work on another grave at the site before they were frightened away.

In 1988, the Pells had a family reunion at the Bartow-Pell mansion. As part of the festivities, the relatives walked down the short path bordered with horse chestnut trees to inspect graves in the ancestral burial ground. Claiborne Pell, a descendant of the original lords of the manor, was an attendee at this reunion. Like his relatives, he had a great appreciation for the place of his ancestors in colonial history and understood that he was raised as American nobility. Though he was born into privilege and vast family wealth, Claiborne Pell envisioned a grant program that would enable low-income students to attend college. As a recipient of this program, a Pell Grant helped put me on a career path that would eventually lead me to New York, and, consequentially, to the Pell ancestral graveyard. Mine is one of countless examples of the ways we are intertwined with—and indebted to—those who have gone before us.

Pell family burial ground, June 2014 (Mary French)

2014 aerial view of the Bartow Pell mansion and Pell family burial ground (arrow) (NYC Then&Now

View more photos of Pell Family Burial Ground

Sources: Map of the Manors Erected Within the County of Westchester: Compiled from the Manor Grants and Ancient Maps (De Lancey 1886); History of the County of Westchester (Bolton 1848); The History of Several Towns, Manors and Patents of the County of Westchester, Vol 2 (Bolton 1881); History of Westchester County,Vol 1 (Scharf 1886); “Where the Pells Lie,” New York Tribune, Dec 6, 1903; “Where the Pells Lie,” [Letter to Editor], Dec 27, 1903; “Old Historic Cemeteries,” Daily Argus (Mount Vernon, NY), Jan 9, 1905; “Ghouls Try to Rob Old Pell Graves,” New York Tribune, Oct 31, 1914; “Pell’s Grave Violated,” New York Times, Oct 31, 1914; The Pell Manor: Address Prepared for the New York Branch of the Order of Colonial Lords of Manors in America (Pell 1917); A Brief, But Most Complete & True Account of the Settlement of the Ancient Town of Pelham…(Barr 1947); National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form—Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum, 1974; “Claiborne Pell, 90, Patrician Senator Behind College Grant Program, Dies,” New York Times, Jan 2, 2009; We Used to Own the Bronx: Memoirs of a Former Debutante (Pell 2009); Pell Family Burial Plot—Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum; Here Lyes the Body: The Pell Family Burial Ground, Mansion Musings, Oct 22, 2016; Cemeteries of the Bronx (Raftery 2016)

St. Michael’s Cemetery

A large stylized cross and rows of small plain crosses mark the Community of St. John the Baptist plot at St. Michael’s Cemetery, where early sisters of this order of Episcopal nuns are buried. (Mary French, Aug 2021)

In 1852, Rev. Thomas McClure Peters acquired seven acres of farmland in Newtown, Queens, to establish a new cemetery that would provide graves and dignified burials for the poor. Rev. Peters, the rector of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan, had devoted himself to mission work in the city’s almshouses, prisons, and hospitals, and among its poorest and most disenfranchised communities. He developed an understanding of the needs of these communities and believed it was possible to run a cemetery on business principles and at the same time furnish the poorer classes of the city with burials at a price within their means. Once he had the cemetery laid out and functioning successfully, Rev. Peters turned it over to the corporation of St. Michael’s Church, which owns and manages it to this day.

St. Michael’s Cemetery gradually added more land over the years to reach its present size of roughly 88 acres in the area bounded by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Grand Central Parkway in East Elmhurst, Queens. Various churches and charitable institutions acquired sections within the cemetery, public grounds were set aside for free and low-cost burials, and private lots were purchased by individuals and families. St. Michael’s Cemetery still serves a diverse constituency and is the final resting place of roughly 175,000 people from all classes, religions, and ethnicities.

Robert Kellner monument at St. Michael’s Cemetery, 1983 (Jackson & Vergara)

The older family plots at St. Michael’s are predominately German and the dark gray markers here are frequently ornamented with statues depicting angels, lamenting females, and other classical imagery. Also here is a life-sized statue of a Doughboy adorning the gravestone of 24-year-old Cpl. Robert L. Kellner, who was killed on the battlefield of the Argonne Forest, France, in 1918. Later sections have markers with Italian and Greek-lettered names, while more recent monuments carry Chinese and Korean inscriptions. The cemetery’s crematorium, opened in 2005, accommodates the needs of the city’s large Hindu population.

The burial place of St. Michael’s most renowned resident—African American composer and pianist Scott Joplin—is found amid the modest markers and unmarked graves in the cemetery’s public grounds. Dubbed the “King of Ragtime,” Joplin experienced a brief period of fame at the turn of the 20^th century, but his career was cut short by mental health issues and he died in poverty in 1917 at age 49. His family was too poor to provide a stone or marker for his grave, and Joplin faded into obscurity as his music waned in popularity.

Plaque marking Scott Joplin’s grave at St. Michael’s Cemetery, Aug 2021 (Mary French)

In 1973, the Academy Award-winning film The Sting stimulated a revival of ragtime and renewed interest in Joplin when his 1902 composition “The Entertainer” was used as the film’s theme music, topping the musical charts for months. The following year, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) installed a bronze plaque at Joplin’s unmarked grave at St. Michael’s. In 2004, St. Michael’s began holding annual ragtime concerts on its grounds in Joplin’s honor, and in 2017 added a memorial bench at the gravesite to commemorate the centennial of his death.

1983 photo showing wreckage of once orderly rows of tombstones at St. Michael’s Cemetery (Jackson & Vergara)

During the 1970s, St. Michael’s fell into disrepair because of budget cuts and a lack of maintenance and experienced a period of intense vandalism and neglect through the 1980s. Intruders toppled hundreds of tombstones throughout the cemetery and  weeds and underbrush completely enveloped the monuments in some sections. At one point, the lack of adequate fencing allowed motorbikes and even cars to drive among gravesites in the cemetery’s southern corner. But a large-scale renovation in the early 1990s restored the historic cemetery to its past beauty, and today it is well maintained and continually expanding through the construction of community mausoleums.

Another modern addition at St. Michael’s is a collection of memorials devoted to the city’s first responders who lost their lives on 9/11 and before. The most striking of these is the Christopher Santora memorial, honoring 76 firefighters who lived or worked in Queens that died on September 11, 2001. The memorial’s centerpiece is a black marble slab bearing an etched image of Santora, the youngest firefighter to die at the World Trade Center on 9/11. These memorials to the city’s service members are a continuation of St. Michael’s mission to create places to remember and celebrate lives.

The Christopher Santora/Sept. 11 Firefighters Memorial at St. Michael’s Cemetery, Aug 2021 (Mary French)

Location of St. Michael’s Cemetery in East Elmhurst, Queens (OpenStreetMap)

Vintage photo showing reporters gathering for the interment of mobster Frank Castello’s casket in the family mausoleum at St. Michael’s Cemetery, February 21, 1973

View more photos of St. Michael’s Cemetery

Sources: Annals of St. Michael’s: Being the History of St. Michael’s Protestant Episcopal Church, New York for One Hundred Years 1807-1907 (Peters 1907); St. Michael’s Cemetery – About; Silent Cities: The Evolution of the American Cemetery (Jackson & Vergara 1989); King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era, 2^nd ed (Berlin 2016); “Our Cities of the Dead,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 28, 1895; “Costello & Legend are Buried,” Daily News, Feb 22, 1973; “A True Note at Composer’s Grave,” Daily News, Oct 7, 1974; “Requiem for the Cemetery?” Daily News, Nov 8, 1974; “Queens Vandals Topple Markers on 300 Graves,” New York Times, Apr 5, 1980; “Seek to Stop Cemetery’s Decline,” Daily News, Jan 11, 1983; “700 Stones Overturned at Cemetery,” New York Times, Aug 10, 1991; “E. Elmhurst Biz Plots for the Future,” QNS.com, May 19, 2004; “Memorial to Firefighers Who Died on 9/11 Is Dedicated,” Queens Gazette, Sep 16, 2004; “New Final Home Underway in Boro,” Queens Tribune, Jun 10, 2010 “Queens Cemetery’s Attempts to Expand on Park Land in Limbo, Daily News, Aug 15, 2013; “Visit to a Historic Cemetery,” CSJB Newsletter, Spring 2013; “Three-Story, 18,800-Square-Foot Mausoleum Coming To St. Michael’s Cemetery, Woodside,” New York Yimby, June 29, 2016; “Joplin Tribute Draws Hundreds of Admirers,” Queens Chronicle, May 23, 2019

St. Michael’s Churchyard and Cemetery, Bloomingdale

A view of St. Michael’s churchyard at 99th St and Amsterdam Ave,  ca. 1880

Much of the area of Manhattan known today as the Upper West Side was once a country village called Bloomingdale (an Anglicization of the Dutch name Bloomendal, meaning “vale of flowers”). In the 18th and early 19th centuries, wealthy residents of downtown Manhattan built summer houses in Bloomingdale to escape the city and its outbreaks of diseases such as cholera, smallpox, and yellow fever. The village was reached from lower Manhattan by the Bloomingdale Road, which opened in 1703 and followed an old Indian trail from what is now 23rd Street to 114th Street. In 1806, several parishioners of Trinity Church in downtown Manhattan founded St. Michael’s Church to serve the summer residents of Bloomingdale. This congregation built their church, a small wood-frame building, on a hill east of Bloomingdale Road, at what is now Amsterdam Avenue and 99^th Street. At its consecration in 1807, it was the only Episcopal Church between lower Manhattan and Yonkers. When this first church building burned down in 1853 it was swiftly replaced with a new sanctuary, consecrated in 1854.

On the south side of St. Michael’s Church, between the building and 99th Street, was the churchyard where parishioners were buried. The first recorded burial in St. Michael’s churchyard was in 1809, when Joseph Armstrong, the two-year-old son of the church sexton, was laid to rest here. In the following years, about 500 burials were made in the churchyard where many members of the church’s more prominent families—such as the DePeysters, Weymans, Wagstaffs, Hazards, and Windusts—had family vaults. Bloomingdale farmers, shopkeepers, and other local households that were members of St. Michael’s congregation also were buried in the churchyard. The last known interment was Abraham Valentine Williams, the 25-year-old son of Dr. A.V. Williams, a former warden of the church, in 1873.

This detail from an 1851 map of upper Manhattan shows St. Michael’s first building and churchyard at 99th Street and 10th (Amsterdam) Avenue and the parish cemetery at 103rd Street

From its founding, St. Michael’s was committed to social service, establishing numerous ministries for the poor and disenfranchised. Although burial in their churchyard was reserved for members of their congregation proper, they provided a burial place for the poorer members of their community at a small cemetery a short distance north of the church. In 1828, the church vestry appropriated for this purpose a little over an acre of ground at Clendining Lane, a site between present-day 103^rd  and 104^th Streets and Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues. Known as “St. Michael’s upper ground,” there were 185 interments in this cemetery until its closure in 1854.

In the early 1850s, Rev. Thomas McClure Peters, rector of St. Michael’s, recognized the need for more burial space for the church and for the many charitable institutions with which it was connected. In 1852, he found appropriate land for a cemetery in Queens, where sections were set aside for St. Michael’s parishioners and burial of the poor. Over time, St. Michael’s Cemetery broadened its scope to provide burial space for other churches and institutions and individuals and families of all faiths. It is still owned and operated by St. Michael’s Church today.

An 1879 map shows St. Michael’s second church building and what remained of the churchyard after 10th (Amsterdam) Ave had been cut through the property. The disused cemetery at 103rd Street is shown as vacant land.

As St. Michael’s developed its new cemetery in Queens, urbanization was making its mark in Bloomingdale and would eventually lead to the obliteration of the parish’s Manhattan burial grounds. Opening of streets through the area in the 1870s carved away at both sites, which are described in an 1879 New York Times article. The churchyard, depicted as “cool and breezy” and “well shaded by great trees,” was by that time only half its original size, “the remainder having been taken from it by the opening of Tenth [Amsterdam] Avenue.” “Though many of its headstones bear the marks of extreme age, and are in some cases crumbled and moss-grown,” the article continues in its description of the churchyard, “they all stand upright, and no intruders are allowed to deface them or trample over the well-kept mounds of the graves.” The Times piece also portrays St. Michael’s parish burial ground at 103^rd Street as a pleasant site, “well shaded with trees and still containing a few old gravestones,” though diminished when a portion was taken when 104^th Street was opened. 

Photo of construction of the present St. Michael’s Church in 1890-91 depicts obliteration of the churchyard when the new building was erected over the burial ground. The old church can be seen behind the new building.

In 1890, St. Michael’s removed the remaining graves from their 103^rd Street burial ground to their cemetery in Queens and the site was redeveloped (New York City Housing Authority’s Frederick Douglass Houses complex covers the site today). By this time the congregation had outgrown their 1854 church building and decided to build a new church on the existing property, including the churchyard area. Some of the old graves and vaults were opened at that time by their owners and the remains removed to St. Michael’s  Cemetery in Queens or elsewhere. However, most of the remains were left in place and lie today beneath the chancel and the southern half of the nave of the present St. Michael’s Church, completed in 1891.

2018 aerial view, arrows indicate approximate locations of the St. Michael’s churchyard and cemetery sites today (NYC Then&Now)

Sources: Map of New-York North of 50th St (Dripps 1851); Bromley’s Atlas of the Entire City of New York, Pl 25-26; Annals of St. Michael’s: Being the History of St. Michael’s Protestant Episcopal Church, New York for One Hundred Years 1807-1907 (Peters 1907); Bodies in Transit Register X:1881-1894, Municipal Archives, City of New York; “Some Old Grave-yards,” New York Times, May 18, 1879, “Old St. Michael’s to be Rebuilt,” New York Herald,” Nov 10, 1889; “For a Handsome New Church,” New York Times, Sep 30, 1890; “Unearthed by Boys at Play,” The Sun, Apr 3, 1892; “Tombs Under the City,” New York Times, Aug 2, 1896; “St. Michael’s Church: Two Centuries and Onward,” St. Michael’s Church, May 2012; St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, Parish House and Rectory  Designation Report (Landmarks Preservation Commission 2016); “Prepare for Death and Follow Me:”An Archaeological Survey of the Historic Period Cemeteries of New York City(Meade 2020)