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Every day, thousands of commuters pass through the Secaucus interchange on the New Jersey Turnpike. They do this without knowing that the ground beneath the ramps, the rail platforms, and the transfer station once held more than four thousand bodies. They were buried in unmarked shafts over the course of eight decades and largely forgotten by the time the state decided to build a highway on top of them.
The site is formally known as the Hudson County Burial Grounds. It is more commonly remembered as the Secaucus Potter’s Field, or by its older and somewhat eerier name, Snake Hill Cemetery.
The term “potter’s field” itself dates to antiquity. It is drawn from the biblical account of Akeldama, the field purchased with the coins paid to Judas Iscariot for his betrayal of Jesus and subsequently used to bury strangers and the indigent.
In American cities, the designation came to describe municipal burial grounds reserved for residents who died without family or means to arrange a private funeral. Nearly every major city has maintained one at some point in its history. Manhattan’s Washington Square Park and Bryant Park both originated as potter’s fields. New York City continues to operate one today on Hart Island in the Bronx, where more than 800,000 people have been interred.
New Jersey has several of its own, including a largely undocumented plot in Sussex County behind a former Alms House and an unmarked acre in Mount Laurel that does not appear on standard mapping services. None, however, achieved the notoriety of the burial ground in Secaucus, owing to the scale of what occurred when the state moved to reclaim the land.
The origins of the site trace back to the Snake Hill region of Secaucus, which by the late eighteenth century was home to the Old Bergen Poor Farm. When the southern portion of Bergen County was reorganized as Hudson County in 1840, the newly formed county purchased the property and constructed its Insane Asylum and Alms House there. This followed a pattern common to nineteenth-century municipal governance in which the poor farm, the asylum, and the burial ground for the indigent were situated in close proximity, serving overlapping and often invisible populations.
The cemetery itself opened in 1880 and for the following eighty-two years, received the remains of residents from those county institutions who died without relatives or resources to provide for their burial. Many had been patients at the asylum, later renamed Meadowview Psychiatric Hospital; others had lived out their final years at the poor house. Burials continued until 1962, by which time the burial register had accumulated approximately seven thousand names.
The county, having long since ceased any active maintenance of the grounds, effectively allowed the site to disappear from public memory. There were no headstones, no markers, and no ongoing care – only an unremarkable stretch of meadowland quietly containing thousands of graves that no one visited.
That changed in the early 1990s, when the New Jersey Turnpike Authority determined that a new interchange, Exit 15X, along with the Secaucus Transfer Station, now known as Secaucus Junction, would require excavating a portion of the old burial ground. What began as an engineering obstacle evolved into an eleven-year archaeological undertaking that has been described by the firm that conducted it as the largest disinterment ever carried out in the United States.
Crews ultimately excavated 2,693 individual grave shafts and recovered the remains of 4,572 people. The excavation also yielded more than 113,000 artifacts. These included coffin nails, dentures, glass eyes, coins, clay smoking pipes, embalming bottles, whiskey and wine bottles, military medals and medical prosthetics.
Investigators cross-referenced these artifacts against hand-written burial ledgers, historical maps, and osteological analysis of the remains themselves. Through that work they were able to establish possible identities for approximately nine hundred of the disinterred individuals.
Further analysis of the bodies provided insight into the causes of death. These included disease, untreated fractures, developmental defects and trauma. Many of the bodies also showed amputations and autopsies being performed.
Two of those identifications resulted in the rare outcome of a living relative being located.
Patrick Andriani, a Hudson County native, had spent years searching for his grandfather’s grave before the excavation began. When human remains were uncovered during construction, county officials contacted him as a potential descendant. Through a combination of ledger records and skeletal analysis, investigators eventually confirmed that the remains belonged to his grandfather, Leonardo Andriani. This allowed the family to inter him in a grave of his own after more than five decades.
A second identification, that of a woman who had died in 1928, was similarly returned to her family for private burial. Andriani’s search later became the subject of a 2007 documentary titled “Snake Hill.”
The final set of remains was removed from the site on October 31, 2003. With the exception of the two individuals reclaimed by their families, nearly all 4,572 recovered remains were reinterred collectively at Maple Grove Park Cemetery in Hackensack. A granite monument bearing bronze plaques now lists more than seven thousand names drawn from the original burial register, memorializing those whose individual graves were never recovered. The Turnpike Authority additionally placed a smaller marker near the new interchange to note the former location of the cemetery.
Despite the scale of the excavation, researchers estimate that as many as five thousand additional graves remain undiscovered. These are believed to be lying outside the boundaries of the construction project and, in some cases, potentially beneath the embankments and footings of the highway itself.
The story of the Secaucus Potter’s Field is, in many respects, the story of every potter’s field: a place established for people society had already ceased to track, designed by its very nature to be forgotten. What distinguishes this site is that, decades later, someone undertook the effort of remembering.
Through painstaking archival and forensic work, county officials and researchers restored names to people who had been buried without them, and in at least one case, made it possible for a grandson to give his grandfather the individual grave that circumstance had denied him for more than fifty years.
Sources: Wikipedia, Archeology.com, NJ State Library
