Deed for St. Paul’s plot in the State Street Burying Grounds

In a previous post, I described St. Paul’s cemetery plot, given to the congregation in 1878 and still in use today. But that section of the Albany Rural Cemetery was not our first cemetery plot. Forty years earlier, in March 1838, the City of Albany granted St. Paul’s “[a]ll that certain piece or parcel of land, bounded on the south by Lancaster street, on the east by the Presbyterian burying ground, on the north by lot number Eleven and by No. 27, and west by Snipe Street” for use as a cemetery.

Diagram of St. Paul’s plot in the State Street Burying Grounds

Can’t quite picture where that would have been? For the past 150 years, Snipe Street has been known as Lexington Avenue. If you extend the line of Lexington and Lancaster Streets (both now much shorter than they were then), you will find that the plot’s southwest corner would have been at a point on the north side of what is now Washington Park.

This was in the State Street Burying Grounds, Albany’s public cemetery from 1800 until 1866. Each Christian denomination had a section, and there were also a Potter’s Field, a section for African-Americans and a small number of graves of persons not associated with a church.

Location of State Street Burying Grounds (credit: @AlbanyArchives)

This image overlays a current photograph of the Washington Park area with a map of the State Street Burying Grounds. In 1838, there were only two Episcopal churches in Albany, and you might expect that St. Paul’s shared the Episcopal lot with St. Peter’s. But it appears that St. Peter’s had sole use of the Episcopal section because the legal description makes it certain that St. Paul’s plot was at the south end of the section marked “Private Cemeteries” on this map. To confirm the location, notice that in the diagram of St. Paul’s section, the north end is marked as the vault of Archibald Campbell. His vault would have been the first of these Private Cemeteries to the north of our plot.

When the State Street Burying Grounds was closed and the land taken to build Washington Park, the burials were moved to the then-new Albany Rural Cemetery, in a section known as the Church Grounds. Our next research effort will be to try to determine who from St. Paul’s was buried in this plot, and where in the Albany Rural Cemetery they now rest.