Abolitionist church excavation

News from downtown New York:

The archaeologist hired by Donald Trump and his project partners Bayrock/Sapir to handle the human remains found at the site of their planned condo-hotel at Spring and Varick Sts. recently filed a report with the city. . .

According to the report, the human remains appear to be from burial vaults built between 1820 and 1835 under the former Spring Street Presbyterian Church, which was razed in 1963 after a fire. . .

The congregants of the church in the early 19th century who were interred in the vaults were not well off. The church admitted African-Americans to full communion as church members and had a multiracial Sunday school as early as 1822 — five years before New York abolished slavery — both of which are quite rare. According to the report, “The church’s fierce abolitionism was known almost from its inception.… Both the church’s reverend, Henry Ludlow, who was surrounded by rumors that he had conducted interracial marriage ceremonies, and former reverend, Samuel Cox, who had seceded from the church in 1825 to found the Laight Street Church, preached racial tolerance to their congregation, with Cox declaring that Jesus Christ was ‘probably of a dark Syrian hue.’ Both churches, as well as the private homes of both reverends, were then attacked by anti-abolitionist mobs.

Posted by David on January 19, 2007 3:02 PM