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History Of Seneca Village

Seneca Village was a small village on the island of Manhattan, New York founded by free blacks in 1825. The village was the first significant community of African American property owners on Manhattan, and also came to be inhabited by several other minorities, including Irish and German immigrants, and perhaps Native Americans as well. The village was located on about five acres between where 82nd and 89th Streets and 7th and 8th Avenues would now intersect, an area now covered by Central Park.

No one is sure how "Seneca Village" got its name. In fact, the community was often referred to as Yorkville on maps and in records. The fact that racist terms were frequently used to describe the community suggests that Seneca Village may have been a derogatory name.

But there are other theories too. Could Seneca have been a distortion of "Senegal," a country in Africa that many people of African ancestry had come from? Was it a "code word," used to help fugitives on the Underground Railroad find their way to freedom? Were the villagers paying homage to Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the great Roman philosopher, dramatist, and statesman whose book Seneca's Morals was read by African American activists? Or maybe it was named for the Seneca Indians, a nation made up of Indians from other nations. There was also a game called "Seneca," which was played in the tall grasses (rushes).

Since no one knows why the village was called Seneca, these guesses must be proved with evidence.

Contemporary uses of the name include a citation in the All Angels' parish register and an article published in the New York Herald in 1914, over fifty years after the village had disappeared.

Seneca Village was founded as slavery was ending in New York State.  According to a law enacted in 1799, enslaved people were to be emancipated (or freed) on July 4, 1827.  The law had many clauses, so that not everyone was freed immediately. For instance, males born before 1799 were not to be emancipated until they turned 28 and females until they turned 25.

In 1807, the Common Council (the city government), fearing that the burial sites--which by that time was located in the very congested downtown area--contributed to the rise in yellow fever epidemics and other diseases, ordered AME Zion not to bury any more people in the graveyard. The trustees of AME Zion asked for burial space elsewhere in the city. The Common Council granted temporary space in the Potter's Field located in the Parade Grounds of Washington Square. Once the church had exhausted this burial space, it purchased land in Seneca Village for burials. The AME Zion Church would eventually have at least two, and possibly three, large burial sites in Seneca Village between 85th and 86th Streets.

The church buried New York City African Americans in Seneca Village until 1852, when a law prohibiting burials south of 86th Street was enacted. The AME Zion Church then began to bury its dead in the Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn.

The sister church of the AME Zion Church today is known as Mother AME Zion and is located on 137th Street in Harlem, New York City. The church recently celebrated its bicentennial (200th anniversary).

Between 1825 and 1832, the Whiteheads sold off fifty parcels of their land. At least 50 percent of it went to people of African ancestry. In addition to purchasing land for burials, the AME Zion Church and its leaders, including Levin Smith and Charles Treadwell, went on to make additional purchases for the church or for themselves. The African Union Methodist Church also bought land and had built a church by the early 1830s.

Before the end of the 1820s, at least nine houses had been built in Seneca Village. The community grew larger in the 1830s, when from a neighboring African American community known as York Hill joined the settlement.  They had been displaced when the city claimed the land located between 79th and 86th Streets, and Sixth and Seventh Avenues, to build the receiving basin for the Croton Reservoir.

In 1855, a New York State Census found that Seneca Village had 264 residents.  The village had three churches, a school, and several cemeteries. At this time in New York City's history, most of the city's population lived below 14th Street, and the region above 59th Street was only sporadically developed and was semi-rural or rural in character. In 1857, all private property within Seneca Village was acquired by the city government through eminent domain, for the purpose of constructing Central Park. The village was razed for park construction. In August 2005, the buried remains of the village were the subject of archaeological investigation.

Written By: http://projects.ilt.columbia.edu/seneca/start.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_Village

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