Cemeteries are silent storytellers.

They're narratives etched in stone in time.

Beyond the morbid fascination.

They offer a profound mirror to our collective past.

What do these hallowed grounds reveal about societies that have vanished, leaving behind only fragments of their existence?

Abandoned cemeteries are time capsules.

Their secrets locked within weathered tombstones and overgrown landscapes.

Can these forgotten epitaphs challenge the polished narratives of history books?

Uncovering the hidden chapters of the past.

We delve into the Union Bethel Civil War Cemetery in Lower Township, New Jersey, a testament to a forgotten African American community.

This sacred ground bears witness to a time when black lives were marginalized.

Their stories often erased.

As we peel back the layers of neglect in time.

We embark on a journey to honor those silenced by history.

Their spirits yearning for recognition.

The history of the Union.

Bethel Cemetery begins in the early 1800s.

By 1800, a small community of free blacks had established itself in the area of what is now Tabernacle Road and Shunpike.

In 1831, Thomas Hughes and his wife Prudence convey a half an acre of ground for the sum of $0.25 on which the trustees are to build a methodist Episcopal church and a graveyard for the colored people to be enclosed by a good fence.

The earliest burial in the cemetery is that of Reverend Edward Turner, who was the first minister at the church and who died in 1836.

In the early 1930s, great grandson of Reverend Turner was interviewed, and he states that his father owned an orchard and farmland across the street from the church, and the church was not only used on Sundays, but he went to school there during the week.

The church was later moved, and recently a farmhouse located around the corner from the cemetery is being renovated.

When they took the wings of the house there, in the middle was the original church, with its original clapboard siding still on three sides of the church.

Over the years, the cemetery has been abandoned as the community dispersed and moved on.

Some of the members of the community moved north to join the new black community in Whitesboro.

Many of them moved into Cape May and became part of the thriving black business community that existed there from the early 1900s until the 1960s.

My great great grandfather, my father's side is buried in Union Bethel.

So Memorial weekend was a ritual where they would visit, of course, all the grave sites and my grandfather and my grandfather and father would always go to this particular one.

For whatever reason, they always went to this hidden one.

So I just like riding.

So I just jump in the car.

I didn't know where they were going and I didn't care.

So, I'd hop in the back seat and I realized there were geraniums in the car and some little hand tools.

I'm like, I'm like, oh gosh, I think I know where we're going.

So we would ride up into the country, and the next thing I know, we're driving past [birds chirping] chirping] look like we were pulling into the driveway of this particular property, and I was, like, a little frightened because I'm like, are we supposed to be here?

But my father kept driving and driving and driving [cricket sounds] until we entered this tree infested area.

And my father kept going.

I mean, he didn't stop at the edge.

He kept going.

And, I think he got stuck a couple of times, you know, it was always damp back there.

I was sort of traumatized because it had been overgrown, and I got ticks on me when we left it.

My mother said, oh, Becky, my sister was buried at the by that white rosebush.

And, you know, she was just telling us where everyone was buried because they didn't have the money to buy a headstone.

So I know they're buried there.

I just don't know where it was.

And, a headstone to identify where they were buried.

My first time remembering Union Bethel was I was very young.

I was very young because there were stories.

I remember Octavine Wanda's Aunt, my Aunt Octavine Howard.

So there's a major telling us So there's a major telling us about at funeral time.

about at funeral time.

People would walk to the cemetery behind the cart.

They carried the casket, and there was a special tree they'd be under.

And she said, sometimes it start raining.

[Sound of Rain] The tree was so dense you didn't hear the rain.

So there have been no services under this tree at Union Bethel.

And we would clean up family, cemetery plots or plots where we knew the family couldn't get there.

We had help clean those up, but there would be stories in the neighborhood that at time, they would tell stories when they'd get up there.

And you get to know people because of their, head stone or tombstone.

You know, You know, there would be low hanging branches that sometimes I thought were, you know, snakes hanging off of the branches.

So, you know, I didn't have a really great feeling being back there, but there was something that made me feel like I wanted to be there again.

I didn't know who and why we were there, you know?

you know?

I knew there were graves there, but other than that, I wasn't sure exactly what our connection was at that time.

Over the years, there have been several efforts to clean the cemetery and take care of it.

A lady named Dorothy Germer, who lived in Cape May, organized a group of volunteers who cut down brush and cleaned the headstones.

Different Boy Different Boy Scout troops have made inroads and one Scout chose it as his Eagle Project, building the wooden walkway to the entrance of the cemetery and repairing the flagpole that is there.

More recently, several different troops of Coast Guard recruits have gone in have gone in and cleaned the cemetery, but no one maintained it on a regular basis.

In 2017, Lower Township reconvened its Historic Preservation Commission, and the Commission decided to take the cemetery as one of the historic sites that they would care for.

At the same time, the builders club of the Titlemen Middle School in Lower Township were looking for a project.

I sat down and I'm reading the paper, and I opened to the local section and there's an article on, the Union Bethel Civil War Cemetery and how it had fallen into a state of disrepair, and nobody had touched it for about seven years at that point.

So I had a builder's club meeting that afternoon and said to the kids, listen, this is a great opportunity to give back.

I, I explained to them my respect for the military and all that they've done to protect us and to protect our freedoms and allow us to live the life we live.

And this is a great way to give back to them.

It doesn't matter that it was.

It's not the current military.

It's not.

It's not.

It's a veterans cemetery.

The cemetery has the graves of 17 veterans.

16 of them are veterans of the Civil War.

15 of them served in regiments in the U.S Colored Troops.

The 16th served in the US Navy aboard the gun ship Seneca.

I have a picture of that boat.

US gunboat Seneca one in the Civil War.

They would man ships with African Americans and blockade ports down south.

Most of the ships, I should say that blockaded harbors were African American crews.

And he's the only Civil War sailor of got.

The cemetery is now called the Union Bethel Civil War Veterans Cemetery, and the Historic Preservation Commission continues to care for it and to care for those veterans graves that are located in the cemetery.

One of the members of the commission, Rudy Von Cohn, is a veteran himself, and he does the day to day maintenance.

I hadn't been back here in 50 years when I came back here, look bad, didn't look any different than when I was in high school.

This was a good place to play hooky and high school.

Who would ever think of looking for a graveyard?

The feet go to the east.

Like here.

Head, foot.

It was like a metaphor, a visual metaphor.

So the sun never sets on your soul, or you'll live forever.

Our minds.

That's what that's about.

Never.

Never.

I don't have a single grave in here.

Where two feet face the west on top of his stone the west on top of his stone is a Southern Cross of Honor.

So somewhere at the beginning of the war, his owner, he was a slave.

His owner took him with him to serve the Confederacy.

They never gave him a gun, but they did the laundry, the cooking and things like that.

And he was either rescued or he escaped.

And, he joined the Union service.

And the difference is, anybody that ever served is, anybody that ever served the Confederacy has to have had to have that on their stone.

But if he was a Confederate when he died, the stone would be pointed.

And the saying was so the damn Yankees couldn't sit on their stone [laughs] this stone over here isn't.

Stone.

Shows how poor they were poured concrete.

And they took the screwdriver or something or something and etched information in it.

This man here, he and his wife.

They used to do a lot of plowing and stuff for other forums.

And a friend of mine told me recently that you can hear him coming if you ride in a wagon and he's going ploying and plowing here.

Hollering and people were stopping to plow their gardens and.

Jacob trusty trusty was a big name in this area.

at one time.

There's still a couple around.

I think one woman came down here.

It was her great grandfather.

And she was looking for her ancestor, whose last name was Battest.

Laurie then who worked on the commission at the time, worked in the county clerk's office.

Knew that there were Battest buried in that cemetery.

And she was able to go back and find out that the people buried in that cemetery were this person's ancestors.

And she took the couple down there, and the woman knelt down in front of that headstone and said, great grandfather, I've been looking for you my whole life.

So that was very touching.

And the Battest family is very interesting.

John Battest was arrested John Battest was arrested for being a pirate, and he was taken to court in New York.

And as it turns out, the ship he was on and he was the cook, the ship the ship he was on, the crew members, mutinied [fighting cheers] and they beat up the captain and threw him overboard and then beat up and killed him and threw his body overboard, and then beat up the first mate and threw him.

Overboard.

And took over the ship.

And they ran the ship aground off of new Jersey near New York Harbor, and made their way ashore.

John Battist were put on trial.

John Battist were put on trial.

[sound of court cheers] John Battist was found not guilty by virtue of the fact he was black, and he was just the cook.

I had a man come in here one day looking for that grave.

Edward Turner, who said that he worked with the new Jersey part of the Underground Railroad, and he was writing a play about it.

The tidal other side of the Jordan is a metaphor for freedom comes from the story of Moses in the Bible leading the Israelites from bondage in Egypt to the freedom in the Promised Land, which was on the other side of the Jordan.

So other side of the Jordan is also a refrain commonly heard in Negro spirituals of day, one of which Harriet sings in the play [Singing] I'll meet you in the morning.

I'm bound for the promised land on the other side of the Jordan.

Edward Turner cast his net into the bay.

He may have caught more than fish, and when he brought fugitive slaves, on shore he hide them on his property, and that he personally transported them in his wagon to the next station.

Sometimes in the village of Snow Hill, which is today the city of Lawnside or Haddonfield, or sometimes to other points north.

He did this even after the Fugitive Slave Act became the law of the land in 1850, so he risked being imprisoned, fined $1,000 more than $40,000 in today's money.

To put this in perspective, the 1850 new Jersey census valued his property at $100, so he could have been fined 400 times his entire wealth.

He risked all that.

Put his entire family at risk so others didn't have to suffer for what he and his father had suffered.

I was the surprise to discover it was a headstone with the words grave grave site of nine black sailors who washed up on the shore on Delaware Bay beach, lower Township, circa 1850.

In the later 1800s, the bodies of nine sailors washed ashore on the bayside in Lower Township and nobody knew where they came from.

They knew they were sailors by their clothing.

None of them had any identification.

There was no record of any kind of a shipwreck in the bay at that time.

This is my thinking.

I think they were slaves in Delaware in 1850, and they commandeered a vessel trying to escape slavery, and they got caught a storm [storm sounds] out here in the bay, and the boat was destroyed.

Nine was found on the beach dead.

New Jersey at that time, if you had a slave, you could keep them, you could keep them, but you couldn't get any more.

So they knew if they got out of Delaware and they got here, unless that man from Delaware come looking for them.

They were safe.

And it supported the idea that Edward Turner was involved was involved in the Underground Railroad.

They buried in the cemetery of the church where he preached right across the road where he lived, where he was reputed to have hidden fugitive slaves somewhere on his property.

Where I often stop and think while I sit here, eat lunch, or something, I wonder how many made it.

How many survived that shipwreck?

Nobody knows and we'll never know now.

Probably my great great my great great grandfather is at Union Bethel.

His name is James Stansbury Washington.

When he volunteered, to join the union, the 21st Colored Infantry, he was mis labeled as James Stansbury.

And I don't know what his literacy, you know, ability was.

So I don't know whether or not he realized the error.

We have records that indicate James Stansbury.

Definitely.

Sir James Stansbury definitely was paid.

James Stansbury definitely served his time from 1864 to 1865. from 1864 to 1865.

He was with the, the army of the James and which they ended up, I guess, going from Virginia out to Texas.

I don't know what efforts he made on his own to get his pension.

So his widow, Mary didn't receive any widow benefits benefits after he passed away in 1898.

The other concern was his name is not correct on his headstone.

So after 100 years, they finally my father, my older brother finally were able to get to at least changes headstone.

But it took 100 years.

So it does read now James S Washington.

I'm a descendant of the Turners, and the Turners are all buried over at the Union Bethel Cemetery.

Edward Turner was my grandfather's great great great grandfather, and my grandfather's name was William Major.

His grandfather married, His grandfather married, Edward's daughter, Hetty.

And some of the other people you'll be interviewing today.

There are families all descended from that same family as well, where they married some of the other sisters from Edward's, family or his daughters and sons and whatever.

Here is my grandmother, my grandma, my great grandmother, Ella, who's still buried there.

And her children, all Majors, it's, my uncle Eddie, my grandfather, William, Joseph, Octavine, Esther and McComas and Octavine.

As a matter of fact, when you talk to Becky, she had Becky Wilson record all of our family's native families from Cape May County and who they were and who they're all springs were, and we all have, and we all have, a record of these, these children and their families.

And so that was a good jumping off point, starting point to be able to be able to go back in the census, find your families and know they're buried there.

And Edward Turner, according to Doherty's book, ran his, cart from Cape May point to Cape May with Harriet Tubman.

So that's like in my lineage.

It was a free black community.

And so you could, have your own wherewithal.

You could be You could be a seamstress or a laundress or, something for servicing people here.

The Vance Family There was not.

Much known about the Vance.

It's the first recorded, History.

Cape May County.

Was in the mid 1800s.

And that's when, Joseph G. Vance married.

Laura Turner, talking about the.

Civil War.

Soldiers of the Vance family.

There was Charles.

Henry.

Vance.

There were two other men in the, men in the, Turner family, Isaac, Isaac Turner family, Isaac, Isaac and Henry, who served Colored Union soldiers.

And they were volunteers.

And I thought about that and they said, you know, free men fighting for their brothers and sisters.

I have, uncle by marriage, noble Sanders, noble Sanders, he was a merchant seaman.

Charles Bowes, he was he was with the 22nd unit of Civil War, and not that he was a part of the activity, but the 22nd unit was a unit that guard guarded, President Abraham Lincoln's, casket when he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth.

And then when they were searching for John Wilkes Booth, part of the 22nd unit went to help them search.

And then when the casket was traveling across the country, some were on the train.

Some of the people that are buried there, some of the families that are buried there, in particular the Vances and the Washingtons.

If you go into Cape May and If you go into Cape May and those become very prominent families in Cape May, beginning in the early 1900s, all the way up to the present.

But one of the things that was instilled in us was doing your civic duty again, when you didn't have the right to vote, when you didn't have the right, and freedom and freedom to move around freely when you didn't have the right to go to the school next door to you, you know, you know, when you didn't have those rights, when you were given those rights, my family took full advantage of the opportunity that we will vote.

That is our responsibility.

It is our right.

We earned it.

And that's been passed down.

You know, families has served on.

My father was, in like 1950 something elected to the, with Cape May school board, and he was supposedly one of the first blacks that was actually won an election.

He served for 25 years on that board.

Probably passed the torch over to my oldest brother, Jim and Jim served on the Lower Cape May Regional Board, probably for 20 some odd years.

He became board president.

So for us, it was always just get involved, you know, do something.

Don't sit back and assume that, you know, things just happen.

I know that my grandfather was raised by him.

And that was his father figure.

So whatever it is that James Stansbury did had a great impact on James Leroy, which was my grandfather, which had a great impact on my father, James Raymond senior, which had a great impact on the rest of the six children that my father and mother had.

So it wasn't so much the war experience.

But the family community experience.

Affected my family in that.

John and Vance was the first constable, his cousins, one and then we talked about Ellsworth was the first, African American police officer in Cape May.

My father was a police officer in Cape May.

So it had a the choices of, the jobs of careers, definitely.

Was impacted throughout the generations.

Right onto the family.

My mother, my grandmother, grandfather had six boys, six girls.

And, they all taught us how to be civilized, how to be sensible, how to treat each other.

And that feeling has been passed down through the generations.

My husband and I try to pass that down to our family.

I think cemeteries play an important role in our communities, because it's where we can go back and we can find the people that were responsible for the beginnings of our community and who foster the community that we have today.

I just feel that a lot of stories, especially about the African-American community, kind of fall by the wayside.

A lot of us are going by family stories, things that we've heard so therefore the details are not necessarily as accurate as as they might be.

I think it's really important to keep those memories and that history alive and that, and that, you know, others can learn.

It's important because a lot of the families are still in the area for one and for two, there wasn't very much documentation about, the people that were here, the native people, the people that migrated here, by it being free and black.

I think it's very important that, very important that, we, get as much information about the cemetery as we can.

For me, history's history.

And you can't eliminate certain And you can't eliminate certain portions of history and still claim that you're telling history.

So I think it's important when people recognize, oh, my goodness, you know, this is part of history.

It's part of Cape May County.

History is part of Lower township history.

It's just part of history.

Headstones tell the story of the changing culture of this country.

So, you know, if you go back far enough, headstones lots of times have skulls and crossbones.

And then later on in Victorian times they frequently have angels and sometimes the angels.

The head of the angel is a skull.

And and, you know, the whole art in cemeteries is interesting on a level.

All of its all its own.

But you know, to know, to be able to stand somewhere and say, you know, this is where I came from, is important.

And, you know, we, we, we can't lose our ties to the people that came before us and gave us the life that we have today.

Places like that cemetery there are of incalculable value to storytellers.

They transport us back to another time.

We imagine who these people were, what life was like for them.

Then I really feel that it's important for every American to know our history.

And I think that over time, as Dick Gregory once said, history is written by the winners.

The history that we've learned is the history that was written by the white men who fought.

We don't hear much about the history of the day to day life of ordinary people, whether it was during the time of conflict or during the time in between conflict and not many people.

and not many people.

It's my personal opinion.

It's the reason people hate history, was because not many people like memorizing facts and they don't like memorizing things things about one particular person.

But if you can tell them a story that they can relate to, then they learn to love our history and these stories of this small black community.

And it And it it maybe it was in a small black community, maybe where you lived, it was a small Italian community or a small Irish community, but we have that same kind of heritage where we have a community and we nourish that community, and we build a church or some sort of, place where the community comes together and where we can go back and we can say our ancestors are here in American soil.

That is the way to make us all realize that we're we're all Americans and we're all the same.

We all have the same background in some way.

We all share the same history, and we're not going to learn that from textbooks in school.

We're going to learn that from the stories that we learn.

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