Harrisburg's Lincoln Cemetery

The Lincoln Cemetery in Penbrook, Pennsylvania, features the largest burial ground for African Americans in the Harrisburg region. Founded in the 1870s, 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. Black Americans achieved dignity in death despite discriminatory policies, as exemplified by Harrisburg's Lincoln Cemetery on South Thirtieth Street in Penbrook. Through the dedication of its founders, church, and volunteer caretakers, this cemetery has persevered through challenges to serve the local community and remains an essential landmark of Harrisburg's Black history.

The plot of land that would become the Lincoln Cemetery officially fell under the ownership of the Wesley Union Church on November 17, 1877. The church, together with solicitor David Mumma, had widely advertised their plans for a new cemetery the previous year. Their proactive efforts in alerting the Black community led to well over one thousand bodies to be disinterred from other cemeteries across the city and reinterred in Lincoln Cemetery. By some estimates, the majority of the Black burials of Harrisburg's preexisting cemeteries — at the African Burying Ground, Wesleyan Church Cemetery, and Harris Free Cemetery — were moved to Lincoln Cemetery at this time.

Both white and Black citizens attended the cemetery's 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 appeared well; the Wesley Union African Methodist Episcopal (AME) 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.”

Lincoln Cemetery was segregated, as was common to all nineteenth-century cemeteries in the city. Though segregation is often associated with the South, it was prevalent in northern cities as well. In Harrisburg, the dilapidated condition of Wesley Union’s older burial ground reflected the cards that Black residents had been dealt in this regard. The realities of segregation made the Lincoln Cemetery necessary to provide African Americans with proper, dignified burials. Thanks to the actions of the Wesley Union AME Church, Harrisburg gained an essential new center for Black burials.

In fact, the Lincoln Cemetery is so significant that numerous influential members of Harrisburg's African American community have made 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. His funeral was the first 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 figure buried in the cemetery 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. The gravesites for four of these figures can still be visited in the Lincoln Cemetery alongside thousands of others. 

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 persisted 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 an estimated $20,000 to $25,000 in damage. 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. Today, Saving Our Ancestors' Legacy (SOAL) plays the important role of safeguarding the cemetery. 

The 1990s saw an increase in recognition of the Lincoln Cemetery as an essential part of Harrisburg’s history as well. Amid the cleanup efforts following vandalism, 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 and the Wesley Union AME Zion Church. Nevertheless, a lack of adequate funding and other resources for maintenance still haunted the Lincoln Cemetery for years, 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 SOAL, a grassroots volunteer organization founded by the descendants of those buried there. SOAL has conducted a regular program of physical restoration, including cleaning and repairing grave markers, groundskeeping efforts, uncovering lost graves, restoring the landscape, and protecting against ongoing vandalism. SOAL has also collaborated with a range of institutions, including Messiah University and the Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, to document and share the cemetery’s story with wider audiences. SOAL is committed to restoring and preserving “Harrisburg’s Oldest Black Cemetery” both in the physical world and in the digital one, helping ensure 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. 

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