Chesterfield Friends Burial Ground in Crosswicks, New Jersey

About

Get directions Crosswicks, New Jersey, USA

Coordinates: 40.15193, -74.64779
Cemetery ID:

Members have Contributed

About these numbers These percentages indicate the number of Find a Grave memorials that have a grave photo or GPS coordinates. We don't know the total number of burials in a cemetery, so we cannot calculate a percentage of those with memorials, photos or GPS coordinates.

Photos

6 open photo requests.

This burial ground has been inactive for well over a century, if not nearly two centuries. It is located on the grounds of the present-day Crosswicks Friends Meeting, 15 Front Street (at the corner of Church Street) in the center of the village of Crosswicks. This is the original site of the Chesterfield Monthly Meeting of the Society of Friends, established in 1684, soon after the settlement of the Crosswicks area by English Quakers. For a time, it was also called Chesterfield Preparatory Meeting. The burial ground is described in Old Burial Grounds of New Jersey: A Guide by Janice Kohl Sarapin (1994), p. 152-3.

The location is not to be confused with what is designated at Find A Grave as the Crosswicks Friends Meetinghouse Cemetery on Ward Avenue, Crosswicks. That burial ground sits behind the smaller brick meetinghouse established by the local Orthodox Quakers at the time of the Hicksite-Orthodox schism in the years following 1827. (The Hicksite Friends were more numerous in Crosswicks and continued to occupy the Front Street meetinghouse.) The factions reunited in 1955, and both sites are now owned by Crosswicks Quaker Meeting. However, the Ward Avenue location is leased to the Chesterfield Township Historical Society for use as a museum.

Note that a number of graves and markers were relocated from this burial ground to Crosswicks Community Cemetery in North Crosswicks (Hamilton Twp., Mercer Co.). As of May 2015, only one gravestone could be found at the Front Street grounds--that of Increase Woodward. The small marker set low in the ground, in typical Quaker style, is behind the First Day School. Presumably, there were hundreds of burials here that are no longer marked, and are not among those relocated to Crosswicks Community Cemetery.

Note: If you have comments or corrections to this cemetery entry, please feel free to contact us. -GSNJ Tombstone Hounds (member 48263180)