The Secaucus Potter's Field Cemetery
The History of the Potter's Field Cemetery
According to historic documents, the Snake Hill region of Secaucus was occupied by the Old Bergen County Poor Farm in the late 1700s. In 1845, Old Bergen County split into Passaic and Bergen counties, and Hudson County purchased the poor farm to locate a variety of county facilities. In 1855, Hudson County began building several institutions here, and between 1855 and 1962, the facility included insane asylums, jails, almshouses, orphanages, hospitals, the county agricultural farm and piggery, and three cemeteries. The Potter's Field Cemetery, one of the three original cemeteries associated with the Hudson County facility, appears to have been established in the early twentieth century. In 1962, the cemetery ceased operations.
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Historic Map of Snake Hill, Secaucus, New Jersey
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The eastern spur of the Turnpike was built in 1950, and a two-span bridge was built to pass over the cemetery. During the 1960s, Hudson County attempted to have bodies removed from the Potter's Field Cemetery; but the attempt ended in the indictment of some officials and it is uncertain whether any bodies were actually moved. In the 1980s, Hudson County built a temporary correctional/detention center on the parcel containing Potter's Field Cemetery.
The first substantive attempts to identify persons buried in Potter's Field Cemetery occurred in 1992, when the Turnpike was beginning assessments for the Secaucus Interchange Project. In 1996, additional archaeological investigations, including the use of remote sensing techniques and the excavation of trenches determined that human remains were in fact buried within the cemetery and were themselves likely in fairly good condition, although the overall status of the cemetery itself was not good. Wooden gravemarkers had burned in brush fires; and ceramic cylinders used to mark the locations of graves have disappeared over time. Historic landfill covers some of the graves up to six feet in thickness. The New Jersey Historic Preservation Office found in 1996 that the cemetery was not eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places because of lack of depositional integrity.
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