grave

Relic Hunting in Northern Manhattan

Reginald Pelham Bolton

“I chanced to visit an old inn near Fort George some years ago and I noticed a human skull that the proprietor kept among the bottles above his bar.  The man told me he had unearthed it, together with several swords and cannon balls, in his yard.  I offered to buy it, not caring much [...]

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Inwood’s Mount Olympus: The Seaman Mansion in 1869

Old Seaman Mansion in Inwood New York City

A while back I wrote a history of the old Seaman mansion that once stood on the grounds currently occupied by Park Terrace Gardens. Today the only trace of the Seaman estate is the crumbling marble arch located down the hill on Broadway. The following description from 1869 finds the home occupied by its original [...]

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The Old Nagle Cemetery

Inwood Cemetery, NYC

In mid-17th century Jan Nagle and Jan Dyckman traveled to the New World and settled in northern Manhattan. For more than two centuries the families farmed the land, raised cattle, planted orchards, built bridges and homes and even intermarried. And while Dyckman is a familiar Inwood name, largely thanks to the preservation of the post-Revolutionary [...]

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Forgotten Cemeteries of Inwood

Old Cemetary in Inwood, New York. The old Dyckman and Nagle graveyard.

It’s hard to imagine an Inwood with mansions on the hill, a dirt road below, and just east of that cemeteries….yep….Cemeteries. Hundreds of years of even sparse population generated numerous graves. In some lay the long forgotten members of once famous families. In other plots were the remains of slaves, the fallen dead of the [...]

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