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Archiver > NJHUDSON > 1998-09 > 0906300107


From: "JOANNE LYONS" <>
Subject: City Cemetery/Floral Rest/Newark, NJ
Date: Sun, 20 Sep 1998 10:01:47 -0400


Today the Sunday Star Ledger (Front Page!) features a story on a cemetery in
Newark,NJ.
I am going to selectively quote from the article, it covers 3 pages.
"The remains of thousands of men, women and children lie under mounds of
garbage and debris on a wedge of grimy industrial Newark, their graves
forsaken by the city for a dump.
The five acre plot-once called City Cemetery, later Floral Rest-quietly and
illegally was shifted from a pristine potter's field to an industrial
storage yard in the 1960's and is now a city dump."
City Cemetery was started in 1869 on 15 acres, whittled down to 5 acres by
1903. Most likely there are also burials within the 10 acres sold to United
Railroad and Canal Co. in 1903.
By 1923, 14,000 bodies had been buried in City Cemetery. In the 1940's &
50's eight bodies a week were being buried there.
It was renamed Floral Rest in a rededication ceremony in 1951 after it had
been all cleaned up and small markers put on every grave.
About 1954 the city deemed the property "too valuable" for a public
graveyard.
In 1966 the city of Newark stopped using it for burials and started using it
as a storage yard.
It was leased to Kingsland Drum and Barrel Co. in 1975.
Suit is being brought against the city and others by the daughter of one of
those interred there. (Her daughter works for the Attorney General's office
as a lawyer.)
Someone remembered that "Floral Rest looked like a smaller, simpler version
of Arlington National Cemetery-with rows of uniform grave markers, green
grass, shrubbery, cobblestone walks and the American flag waving from high
atop a flagpole."
BTW, the city is also claiming that it's records from City Cemetery- records
documenting who is buried there and where they are buried-are missing.
An archaeologist speculates that" they didn't think anyone would say
anything about an abandoned potter's field.
There are pictures of the rubble, which is now 30 feet deep which would
break your heart.
Jo
NJ

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