Harrisburg's Lincoln Cemetery

The Lincoln Cemetery in Penbrook, Pennsylvania, features the largest burial ground of African Americans in the Harrisburg region. Founded in the 1870s to create a place, the cemetery is the final resting place for some of the Commonwealth's most influential Black citizens.  

Harrisburg, Carlisle, Chambersburg, and Gettysburg: four communities in south-central Pennsylvania with their own rich histories. However, one rather surprising fact unites them all: each contains a burial ground called the Lincoln Cemetery. Following the Civil War, this name became common for Black cemeteries nationwide, many of which were founded in response to discriminatory policies that barred African Americans from decent burials elsewhere. However, through their own efforts and resolve, Black Americans were able to achieve dignity in death in spite of these policies, one local example of this being the Harrisburg Lincoln Cemetery on South 30th Street in Penbrook. Over the years, it has experienced many ups and downs, but as the direct result of the work of its founders, its church, and its volunteer team of caretakers, it has proudly served the local community for the past fifteen years, asserting it as an essential landmark for Harrisburg Black history.

After being passed between several owners throughout the nineteenth century, the plot of land that would become the Lincoln Cemetery officially fell under the ownership of the Wesleyan Union Church on November 17, 1877. Both white and Black citizens attended its dedication ceremony on a windy Sunday afternoon, enjoying music provided by the church as well as addresses from speakers such as William Howard Day, who also read aloud the deed transferring ownership to the church trustees. In the few years following the opening of the Lincoln Cemetery, all was well; the Wesleyan Union M. E. Church was praised for owning all of its properties, including Lincoln, with no debt, and one April 1882 article of the Patriot described it as being “in a most flourishing condition.”

The church, along with solicitor David Mumma, had been planning on using this plot of land as a cemetery for at least a year prior to 1877, and their proactiveness in alerting residents of the acquisition led to over 1,000 bodies being reinterred free of charge. African Americans were well aware that segregation permeated the realm of burial, even in a northern city like Harrisburg, and the dilapidated condition of Wesley Union’s old burial ground reflected the cards that Black residents had been dealt in this regard. However, it also demonstrated why something like the Lincoln Cemetery was so incredibly necessary for giving African Americans the proper, dignified burials that they deserved. Thanks to Wesley Union’s recognition of this fact, Harrisburg had gained an essential addition to its collection of cemeteries: a new center for Black burials.

In fact, the Lincoln Cemetery is so significant that many important members of the Harrisburg African American community call it their final resting place. One of these is none other than William Howard Day, who had delivered a speech at the cemetery’s opening about twenty years before his death in 1900 at the age of seventy-eight. His funeral was the first ever to be held in Wesley Union’s auditorium, and hundreds of guests came to pay tribute to this highly influential Black school board president, scholar, and activist. Another notable internee is T. Morris Chester, the famed Black Civil War correspondent and lawyer whose successes began at his family’s oyster house in Harrisburg before expanding internationally. Harriet McClintock Marshall, Wesley Union Church member and Underground Railroad conductor, is not only buried there, but she contributed to a monument for African American Civil War veterans in the cemetery, as well. Those veterans include Ephraim Slaughter, who was the city’s last living Civil War veteran and namesake of American Legion Post 733. All four of these figures can be visited in the Lincoln Cemetery to this day alongside thousands of others. The vast majority of internees may not have had the same level of influence on the community, but they deserve no less dignity, and dignity they shall receive. 

However, dignity was not always accessible to African Americans even in death. While Black cemeteries elsewhere in Harrisburg attracted attention for their extreme states of neglect in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Lincoln Cemetery faced its own troubles well into the twentieth century, demonstrating how the effects of segregation can persist long after these harmful policies were supposedly abolished. Even as recently as the early 1990s, vandals and motorbike riders toppled around two hundred gravestones, causing approximately $20,000 to $25,000 in total damages. Jeanne E. Jones, chairwoman of the church’s cemetery committee, did what she and other volunteers could to restore as much as possible, but the Wesley Union AME Zion Church struggled with a lack of adequate funding for the job. 

Despite these unfortunate setbacks, the 1990s saw an increase in recognition of the Lincoln Cemetery as an essential part of Harrisburg’s history, as well. Amid the vandalization cleanup efforts, the Lincoln Cemetery was chosen as a recipient of the 1991 Historical Preservation Award by the Historic Harrisburg Association. Then, during the summer of 1994, the cemetery received its historical marker in a dedication ceremony sponsored by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission as well as the Wesley Union African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Nevertheless, a lack of adequate funding and other resources for maintenance would still haunt the Lincoln Cemetery for years to come, even after receiving its honors, leaving it in an “extreme state of neglect” as of June 2021. 

Today, restoration of the Lincoln Cemetery is overseen by SavingOurAncestorsLegacy (SOAL), a grassroots volunteer organization founded by the descendants of internees. Not only does SOAL conduct physical restoration—including cleaning and repairing grave markers, groundskeeping, and even uncovering lost graves—but it has also been collaborating with a range of institutions, including Messiah University and the Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, to tell the cemetery’s story online. SOAL is committed to restoring and preserving “Harrisburg’s Oldest Black Cemetery” both in the physical world and in the digital one, helping to assure that the stories of the people buried there—as well as those of the cemetery as a whole—will be honored for generations to come, bringing some much deserved dignity to one of the city’s most significant unsung landmarks. 

Location

Metadata