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Details | |
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Established | 1849 |
Location | East 22nd Street, Bayonne, New Jersey |
Country | United States |
Coordinates | 40°39′27″N74°06′25″W / 40.65762°N 74.10687°W Coordinates: 40°39′27″N74°06′25″W / 40.65762°N 74.10687°W |
Type | Private |
Size | 2 acres |
Find a Grave | Bayonne Constable Hook Cemetery |
Constable Hook Cemetery is the name used to refer to two cemeteries on Constable Hook in Bayonne, New Jersey, the extant Bayonne Constable Hook Cemetery and the no longer existing Van Buskerck Family Burial Ground. Both were founded by members of the van Buskirk family, descendants of the cape's first settler, Pieter Van Buskirk. In 1906 the Standard Oil Company purchased the family land to expand their refinery, already the largest in the world at the time. [1] Myths and historical inaccuracies have led to confusion about the two burial grounds. [2]
James J. Van Buskirk (1791–1856), of the sixth generation of early Dutch settlers in Bayonne, laid out a cemetery in 1849 during a cholera epidemic which had struck the area. [3] In 1854 Van Buskirk wrote a will and mentioned 2 acres (8,100 m2) of his land situated at Constable Hook off East 22 Street was to be reserved for the cemetery. Many prominent Bayonne residents were buried there. It was later enclosed by oils tanks of Tide Water Oil Company. [3]
The official name of the cemetery is not known, but it was often referred to in documents as "Hook Cemetery", "Bayonne Cemetery", "Constable Hook" et al. It is currently called "The Bayonne Constable Hook Cemetery".
Today part of the cemetery still exists due to a restoration project of the 1980s. The cemetery is surrounded by property owned by International Matex Tank Terminal, [4] [5] which owns about 600 acres on the hook. [6] Some remains were relocated to the Moravian Cemetery on Staten Island. There are approximately 140 headstones. [4] Information about the graves prior to the 1880s is incomplete. [4] [7]
The Van Buskirk Family Burial Ground which has also been known as Constable Hook Cemetery, the old Van Buskirk's Cemetery [8] [9] and the Constable Hook Graveyard was founded by Pieter Van Buskirk in about 1736. [10] The cemetery was located on a bluff on the north side of the cape near the homestead and held the remains of early settlers to the region, most of which were disinterred and transferred to other cemeteries. [11] A survey taken in 1903, two or three years before it the cemetery was obliterated, counted 104 headstones. [12] The burial ground became the subject of a court case between Standard Oil and members of the Van Buskirk family, who contended the sale to the oil company by one family member in 1905 was illegal. In 1926 the case was finally settled in favor of the oil company. [12] [13]
Bayonne is a city in Hudson County in the U.S. state of New Jersey. Located in the Gateway Region, Bayonne is situated on a peninsula situated between Newark Bay to the west, the Kill Van Kull to the south, and New York Bay to the east. As of the 2020 United States census, the city was the state's 15th-most-populous municipality, surpassing 2010 #15 Passaic, with a population of 71,686, an increase of 8,662 (+13.7%) from the 2010 census count of 63,024, which in turn reflected an increase of 1,182 (+1.9%) from the 61,842 counted in the 2000 census. The Census Bureau's Population Estimates Program calculated that the city's population was 69,211 in 2021, ranking the city the 544th-most-populous in the country.
Holy Name Cemetery is a Roman Catholic cemetery in Jersey City, New Jersey administered by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Newark. It was established in 1866 and at the end of calendar year 2002 has accepted 264,984 burials. The cemetery parcel is 63 acres (250,000 m2) and all but 0.3 acres (1,200 m2) has been developed and sold for burials. It is an active cemetery providing services to Catholic families.
The Hudson County Burial Grounds are also known as the Secaucus Potter's Field and Snake Hill Cemetery and it is located in Secaucus, New Jersey.
Constable Hook is a cape located on the north side of the outlet of Kill van Kull into Upper New York Bay in Bayonne, New Jersey. The cape has long been an important site of marine transfer operations in the Port of New York and New Jersey. Just offshore, Robbins Reef Light serves to guide harbor traffic. Since the late 20th century, brownfields have been repurposed for recreational and commercial uses.
Bergen Point is a point of land that lends its name to the adjacent neighborhood in Bayonne in Hudson County, New Jersey, United States. The point is located on the north side of Kill van Kull at Newark Bay. It is the section of the city closest to the Bayonne Bridge. Historically the term has been used more broadly as synonymous with Constable Hook, from which it is geographically separated at Port Johnson.
The Hudson River Waterfront Walkway, also known as the Hudson River Walkway, is a promenade along the Hudson Waterfront in New Jersey. The ongoing and incomplete project located on Kill van Kull and the western shore of Upper New York Bay and the Hudson River was implemented as part of a New Jersey state-mandated master plan to connect the municipalities from the Bayonne Bridge to the George Washington Bridge with an urban linear park and provide contiguous unhindered access to the water's edge.
Bergen Square, at the intersection of Bergen Avenue and Academy Street in Jersey City, is in the southwestern part of the much larger Journal Square district. A commercial residential area, it contains an eclectic array of architectural styles including 19th-century row houses, Art Deco retail and office buildings, and is the site of the longest continually-used school site in the United States. Nearby are the Van Wagenen House and Old Bergen Church, two structures from the colonial period. St. George & St. Shenouda Coptic Orthodox Church founded by early Egyptian immigrants was one of the original Coptic congregations in New Jersey.
Pieter Van Buskirk, also spelled Boskerck, is considered the first settler in the Constable Hook area of Bayonne, New Jersey.
Pierre Prosper Garven was the Mayor of Bayonne, New Jersey. He was an alternate delegate to 1916 Republican National Convention for New Jersey. He was the Hudson County Prosecutor of the Pleas in 1919.
Henry Meigs Jr. was the Mayor of Bayonne, New Jersey, from 1869 to 1879. He was president of the New York Stock Exchange.
The Jersey City and Bergen Point Plank Road was a road originally built in the 19th century in Hudson County, New Jersey, United States which ran between Paulus Hook and Bergen Point. The company that built the road received a charter on March 6, 1850 to improve one that had been built in the 18th century. It has subsequently become Grand Street and Garfield Avenue in Jersey City and Broadway in Bayonne. Plank roads were built during the 19th century, often by private companies as turnpike roads, in this case with a tollgate at Communipaw Junction. As the name suggests, wooden boards were laid on a roadbed in order to prevent horse-drawn carriages and wagons from sinking into softer ground on the portions of the road.
Buskirk is a surname of Dutch origin. Notable people with the surname include:
The Machpelah Cemetery, also spelled as "Macpelah Cemetery", or "Macphelah Cemetery", is a cemetery in Hudson County, New Jersey.
The Abel I. Smith Burial Ground was a family burial plot in Hudson County, New Jersey, United States.
National Docks Secondary is a freight rail line within Conrail's North Jersey Shared Assets Area in Hudson County, New Jersey, used by CSX Transportation. It provides access for the national rail network to maritime, industrial, and distribution facilities at Port Jersey, the Military Ocean Terminal at Bayonne (MOTBY), and Constable Hook as well as carfloat operations at Greenville Yard. The line is an important component in the planned expansion of facilities in the Port of New York and New Jersey. The single track right of way comprises rail beds, viaducts, bridges, and tunnels originally developed at the end of the 19th century by competing railroads.
The Bayonne refinery strikes of 1915–1916 were labor actions of refinery workers in Bayonne, New Jersey, mostly Polish-Americans who struck Standard Oil of New Jersey and Tidewater Petroleum plants on Constable Hook beginning in mid-July 1915.
The Presbyterian Burying Ground, also known as the Old Presbyterian Burying Ground, was a historic cemetery which existed between 1802 and 1909 in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., in the United States. It was one of the most prominent cemeteries in the city until the 1860s. Burials there tapered significantly after Oak Hill Cemetery was founded nearby in 1848. The Presbyterian Burying Ground closed to new burials in 1887, and about 500 to 700 bodies were disinterred after 1891 when an attempt was made to demolish the cemetery and use the land for housing. The remaining graves fell into extensive disrepair. After a decade of effort, the District of Columbia purchased the cemetery in 1909 and built Volta Park there, leaving nearly 2,000 bodies buried at the site. Occasional human remains and tombstones have been discovered at the park since its construction. A number of figures important in the early history of Georgetown and Washington, D.C., military figures, politicians, merchants, and others were buried at Presbyterian Burying Ground.
Jacob Rutsen Schuyler founded Schuyler, Hartley and Graham, the largest firearms retail business in the United States in 1860.
The Exxon Mobil–New Jersey Environmental Pollution Settlement was a 2015 legal settlement between Exxon Mobil Corporation and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, over contaminated sites at oil refinery plants and other facilities at Bayway Refinery in Linden and Bayonne Refinery in Bayonne, New Jersey dating back to the Standard Oil's use of the properties starting in the 1870s. The settlement was controversially settled by Governor Chris Christie's Administration for far less than the state originally sought when it began the lawsuit in 2004, and has been the subject of intense criticism from activists and environmentalists.
Historian Virginia Brown found that James Van Buskirk had opened this public cemetery in 1849. Before Tide Water Oil enclosed it with tanks, many prominent Bayonne families had bought plots here
1736 – Pieter Van Buskirk began a burial site for family and friends; it was adjacent to the house on the north shore of Constable Hook near the present New York Bay; Van Buskirk buried his wife Tryntje in the graveyard that same year at the Van Buskirk homestead, which became a private burial site for family and friends; it was referred to as the Van Buskirk Burial Ground and was used for interment until 1905
On the hill north of the Standard Oil storage tank field, Pieter Van Buskirk built what was probably the first house in Bayonne. In the yard was the cemetery where lay the remains of the Van Buskirks, the Vreelands, the Latourettes, the Garrabrants and the Cadmuses until a few years ago when these remains were disinterred and transferred to other cemeteries and the property was acquired by the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey.
The following inscriptions were copied by Mr. John Neafie, of 72 West 93d Street, New York City, about 1903, from an old graveyard at Constable's Hook, in the City of Bayonne, Hudson County, New Jersey. The graveyard was on the old Van Buskirk place, which Peter Van Buskirk derived through his wife, the daughter of Hans Harmanse, whom he married in the latter part of the seventeenth century. On revisiting the spot two or three years later, Mr. Neafie found that the graveyard had been obliterated and all the tombstones had disappeared. A contractor had been employed to clear the ground for the erection of the refinery plant of the Standard Oil Company.