Second Asbury AME Cemetery

Sep 9

Written By alanah cooper

Site Brief:

Founded: 1850

Location: Staten Island, NY

Additional name(s): Cherry Lane Cemetery

Affiliate group(s):

Greater Astoria Historical Society
NYGenWeb

History:

The land was deeded in 1850 by John and Tabitha Blake to the Second Asbury AME congregation so they would have a church a cemetery. The congregation included families from New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia. Among the interred in Benjamin Prine, the last enslaved person born on Staten Island who died in 1900 aged anywhere from 99-111. We know this because he was so well-regarded that his obituary made the wire services and was printed as far away as Iowa. Also, Benjamin, although enslaved at the time, was also a veteran of the War of 1812. (Slavery was outlawed in New York in 1827.)

Sadly, the church was torn down by vandals in the 1880s, and what few headstones that existed were broken. It also had the misfortune of being located in what would become, as far back as the early 1900s, a commercial and business district, and was zoned commercial, even though it was a cemetery.

In the 1950s, the city sued the board members for back taxes totaling over $11,000 because of its zoning. Since there were no headstones and no burials had taken place since c.1910, no one nearby testified that it was a cemetery, although there are municipal maps dating back to the 1850s that show it was. The city therefore illegally seized the property since the taxes couldn’t be paid, the cemetery was bought by a family of real estate attorneys, and it was turned into a Shell station in 1963. By 1985 it had become the strip mall it currently is today. No bodies were ever moved because, it was argued, there was no cemetery.

I was able to track down Benjamin Prine’s descendants, and even though they live a mile from the cemetery and their aunt was on the cemetery board, they knew nothing about their ancestor, the cemetery, or that there had been slavery on Staten Island, because an entire history of theirs had been paved over.