One Site--Two Cemeteries--More than Two Hundred Years of Local African-American History

Welcome to the North Queen Street and Locust Grove Cemeteries in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. On these grounds, discover the stories of African-American men and women who struggled against the injustices of slavery, racism, and segregation in order to build new lives of freedom for themselves and their families.

Slavery in Central Pennsylvania

African Americans first came to Shippensburg as slaves. The The Cumberland County tax collector first noted slaves on the county’s tax roll of 1765, listing four slaveholders owning a total of eight slaves in Hopewell Township (which encompassed the town of Shippensburg).  Slaves were listed with other property and livestock. In 1780, when Pennsylvania’s newly enacted Act for the Gradual Emancipation of Slavery prompted an accounting of all slaves, the number of slaves in Hopewell Township had risen to forty-seven slaves--almost a sixfold increase in old fifteen years. 

Pennsylvania slaves did not live on large plantations, but lived in close proximity to their owners and worked side-by-side with them as farm laborers, assistants in shops and mills, and as industrial laborers at the region's iron furnaces.

This rocky slope on the edge of town was designated as a burial ground for the community's slaves and free black residents in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Although the exact date of its founding is not known, an early town plan created circa 1790-1800 shows the cemetery labeled "Negro Graveyard."

Richard Baker--Shippensburg Slave and Community Leader

Baker was born into slavery in Shippensburg on March 27, 1797, son of Nell, a slave owned by

Shippensburg’s richest resident David Mahan. According to his obituary, Baker was “of Spanish or Creole descent” and he was described as a “respected colored citizen” who was “upright in his dealings, a consistent Christian, and respected by all.” Baker gained his freedom sometime before his twenty-eighth birthday in 1825, and he chose to stay in Shippensburg where he practiced as a barber.  Upon gaining his freedom, he enjoyed the right to vote for thirteen years until the state constitutional convention of 1838 stripped him of the franchise. More than thirty years later, the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution restored his right to vote.  Baker also led the African-American church that once stood at the cemetery’s front along North Queen Street. When he died, he was buried along the east wall of his beloved congregation’s home. The church underwent renovations in the 1880s, and then it was rededicated in 1886 as the Richard Baker A.M. E. Church in his honor. Baker’s life serves as a testament to both the cruel history of slavery, but also the resilience and achievements of the men and women born in bondage who then chose to build new lives of freedom in Cumberland County.