Honoring Hidden History

There were dozens, if not hundreds, of African-Americans living here in the 18th and early 19th centuries

Feb. 4, 2016

Editorial

As small pieces become known of the story of Ned, a free black man who lived in East Hampton during slavery’s waning days in the North, a larger question — about the scores of other African-Americans who lived here and how to memorialize them — has begun to come into focus.

What we know about Ned so far is that he was the town bellringer between 1780 and 1816 or ’17, a span of about 35 years, and that he was buried on a plot of land deeded to him by Jeremiah Osborn in 1804. His gravestone identifies him as Osborn’s manservant, though town records refer to him in several places as “Jeremiah Osborn’s Ned,” which may indicate that he had been a slave who gained freedom during a wave of manumissions in New York at the beginning of the 19th century.

Ned’s gravesite has been restored, but it is one of only two known here of people of African descent from the Revolutionary period and earlier. The other site, in the South End Cemetery, is of a Gardiner family servant woman.

The fact that there are only two such marked graves is significant, given that there were dozens, if not hundreds, of African-Americans living here in the 18th and early 19th centuries. These men and women, whose names can be found in birth and baptism records, died here and were presumably buried here — and yet there is little record and scant memorial.

We were talking about this with the Rev. Walter Thompson of East Hampton’s Calvary Baptist Church the other day, who said it piqued his interest. In another conversation, Hugh King, the town crier and director of Home, Sweet Home Museum, said that an effort might be made to at least get the names that can be found of these nearly forgotten East Hampton residents onto a plaque as a start.

There are monuments to the war dead and burying grounds filled with Hunttings and Daytons and such, but almost no sense at all of a part of the past that history-keepers, such as The Star’s own Jeannette Edwards Rattray, simply did not put down on paper. In the same way that the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Washington gives honor to those whose names are lost, so too should something be raised to those whose legacies time has almost erased.