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."
