On April 20, 1869, the city of New York opened City Cemetery on Hart Island, now the largest municipal cemetery in the nation and New York’s only green burial ground. At the time, Hart Island was part of Pelham and located in Westchester County. The property had been used during Civil War as a training camp for African American U.S. soldiers and a prisoner of war camp for Confederates.
The city had purchased this property in 1868. Burials were initially individual graves. However in 1872, the Department of Charities and Correction adopted a system of mass burials, developed during the Civil War, to quickly bury United States soldiers on battle fields such that their bodies could later be disinterred and reburied in National Cemeteries or returned to their families at the end of the war.
This burial practice consisted of 150 adults per plot with ledger books preserving the identities and position of each body within a grid. It is described by psychiatrist George Smith, who worked on Hart Island starting in 1885 up until consolidation when the property became the eastern edge of The Bronx.
In 1931, mass graves consisting of three layers of bodies were reorganized into three sections of 50 bodies and the city began to recycle older plots on Hart Island.
Since 1980, 78,545 people have been buried on Hart Island. This year, for the first time since 1872, burial plots expanded to 200 bodies per plot.
During a virtual talk on Thursday, January 9, 2025, at 7 pm ET via Zoom landscape architect Jake Boswell, research faculty at the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University, and Melinda Hunt, artist and founder of The Hart Island Project will present a proof of concept of how the city could now end mass burials, return to burying people as individuals, and preserve New York’s only green cemetery for future generations.
Register for this event, sponsored by the Bronx County Historical Society, here.
Illustrations, from above: A trench at the potter’s field on Hart Island, circa 1890, by Jacob Riis (cropped);
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