On one of our visits, we stumbled upon Fort Hill Cemetery. I use the word stumbled because we had not made any planes to visit the cemetery and only found it because we decided to follow some of the New York historical site markers. While it was a bit creepy to just be walking around a cemetery, not really knowing what we were looking for, we ended up finding some interesting data points.
One important thing is that Fort Hill Cemetery is where Harriet Tubman is buried. After walking for a bit, we decided to find her headstone. I have been to several grave-sites of historically important people and I was a bit surprised when we finally found it due to the lack of signage directing us towards it. We could have walked passed it, and almost did, without evening knowing. Tubman's headstone was located under a tree with a few other headstones around it and as you can see below, covered with all kinds of gifts. People left flowers, plants, small figurines, fruits, and small stones all around the grave. One person even left a bottle of wine and I really wish I had an explanation for that, but I do not.
The discreteness of the grave site gave me pause when we first encountered it, but I look at it a bit differently now at the end of the semester. Over the course of our visits I noticed that when asking people about what they thought represented their town, Harriet Tubman was almost always listed last. I may be reading too much into this, but every time she was listed last, I felt like the person had included her on the list out of some kind of feeling of necessity, that if they didn't that we would think differently or lesser of them. It was odd to me that a lot of people would get so excited to tell us that William Seward, a man I had only heard about in reference to "Seward's Folly" in history class, was from their town and then they wouldn't share the same enthusiasm about Harriet Tubman. A similar incident happened at the Seward House Museum during our tour, where when Harriet Tubman was mentioned it felt like an after thought or out of necessity because everyone had seen the information poster and so the docent couldn't just ignore it. I do not know for certain if these things are related or whether or not I am just reading into these awkward encounters too much, but I think it would be interesting to investigate this concept further.
After our visit to Auburn, I was typing up my field notes and decided to do more research about the cemetery. I learned a lot about its history and about Chief Logan, but the thing I found most interesting about my research was the "Notable People" list featured on the website. I went through and found a handful of people that I wanted to pick out to potentially research further. There were many of the people listed were war veterans, founders/owners of companies, mayors of Auburn, and politicians among other things. I was actually surprised to find people listed for their ties to the prison as I had wrongly assumed that that was something the cemetery would not want to market. Here is the list of people I picked out:
William O. Dapping – covered 1929 riots at the Auburn Prison of the Citizen Newspaper
Charles F. Durston – Warden of Auburn Prison
Dr. Blanchard Fosgate – Physician at the Auburn Prison in 1834
The Rev. Ives – Auburn Prison Chaplain, pastor of the First Methodist Church
Edgar S. Jennings – Warden of Auburn Prison during 1929 riots
J. Warren Mead – Warden of Auburn Prison from 1897 to 1905
Thomas Mott Osborne – Son of Eliza W. and David M. Osborne. Mayor, prison reformer. Warden of Sing Sing prison. Mayor of Auburn 1903-1905
Harriet Tubman – “Former slave, leader of the Underground Railroad”
These people were of interest of me because of their relationship to the prison, but also because in some regards I didn't necessarily understand why some were being considered "Notable People". The Rev. Ives, for example, was listed due to being a Chaplain at the prison, which was just his profession. It would be interesting to see who is responsible for determining who makes it on the list and who doesn't. At the top of the web page, it states that "Friends and family members are invited to send us a few words, to share your thoughts and memories with other readers of this page. New listings are welcome," which suggests that members of the community may play a role in determining the list themselves (forthillcemetery.net).
With regards to the section about Harriet Tubman at the beginning of this post, Harriet Tubman's name was included on the list but towards the bottom. I tried to determine whether or not there was an organization to the list that would cause her to be in that position, but it was not ordered alphabetically nor by date. Again, I am not sure if this has any meaning to it, but in conjunction with the previous observations, I think that it may hold some kind of weight.
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