Faithful Ned: Buried Where He Lived

All along, people knew where the grave was. But who exactly was in it and why the man named Ned was there at all were mysteries lost to time.

Several years ago, when a group of people began compiling a list of the burial grounds large and small in East Hampton Town, one of the volunteers wrote down the inscription on the lonely headstone in a tiny plot off Morris Park Lane. It read:

“Ned

Faithful Negro Manservant to Capt. Jeremiah Osborn

Died August 8, 1817”

Beyond those spare words, anything else about Ned had long since been forgotten, and it was only recently that an effort was made to discover who he was.

East Hampton was demographically complex even as far back as the early Colonial period. A town church list of deaths, begun in 1696, was “only of English & not negro or Indian, slaves or servants,” its keeper wrote.

Later records indicate that Ned was not alone as an African-American living in East Hampton around the time of the Revolutionary War. Baptisms for “negroes” conducted in 1764, for example, included Hagar, Joe, Abagail, Dina, Peggy, Hittie, Pegg, Jars, Judge, Virgil, and Peg and her children; last names, if any of them had them, were not included. And for most, the locations where they were buried when they died have been lost.

Zachary Cohen, a Springs resident who heads an official committee that keeps an eye on the town’s far-flung burial plots, said that Ned’s burial site was one of only two or three known here that dated to pre-Emancipation times.

As an effort to restore Ned’s grave and learn more about him got going a few years ago, Russ Calemmo, who builds and restores household lighting fixtures from his home workshop on Three Mile Harbor Road in Springs, took on the legwork.

“It was a project of love. ‘Hey, let’s find out who this person was,’ ” Mr. Calemmo said in an interview.

Mr. Calemmo spent days on end in county offices, tracing property records for clues. “They started to call me Ned’s uncle,” he said.

Eventually the search reached the East Hampton Library, where Steve Russell Boerner, who works part-time in the Long Island Collection, was quickly able to locate a key deed that had been in the collection for years. Ned, it seemed, must have been the same person who was apparently deeded a half-acre plot in Sandy Hook — which would a century and a half later become Morris Park — by one Jeremiah Osborn, in 1804. Adding a key detail, the deed described Ned as “a free blackman.”

A space remains on the deed where the price, if any, for the transfer would have been written, though at the bottom, as Mr. Boerner pointed out, the signatures of two witnesses can be found. To several people who have seen the deed, this suggests that the property had been a gift, but that is unclear. Also not clear is whether Ned at some point in his life had been a slave, though it appeared that Osborn had been a slave-owner.

Pastor Walter S. Thompson Jr. of East Hampton’s Calvary Baptist Church said that Ned’s grave was an important story, not just for African-Americans but for East Hampton as a whole.

“We have stumbled upon it, but it may have become a way to bring the community to remember its history,” he said in an interview. “Some of it has been painful, so we learn about the past so we don’t repeat that pain.”

Today, Ricardo Guichay and his wife, Ilda Oleas, originally from Ecuador, live on what now is thought to have been Ned’s homestead. Their daughter Maritza Luna Guichay, who grew up there with her siblings and now works as a comptroller for a local house builder, said her father had at first thought that Ned had been a Native American and had always taken care of the site.

Sometimes when she or her sister or brothers were acting up as children, their father would keep them in line by warning that Ned might come to get them, Ms. Luna Guichay said.

She said that as members of an immigrant minority in East Hampton her family appreciated the importance of Ned’s burial ground. “It’s really nice to know that someone really valuable is in the backyard.” Now, when no one else is around, his memorial is guarded by Princess, the family’s loud but apparently friendly dog.

Freedom laws in New York State were slow in coming. In 1799 the Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery was passed by the legislature. A later law set a date of July 4, 1827, for the liberation of most slaves in the state.

A good deal is known about Jeremiah Osborn. Despite the title, he was not a seafarer or a military captain, Mr. Cohen said, but rather gained the honorific by loaning money to the rebels during the Revolution.

After Captain Osborn’s first wife, Mary, died in 1797, he married his late cousin Lewis Osborn’s widow, Jerusha, herself by birth a member of the Gardiner family of the island that bears the same name.

The Gardiners are known to have kept slaves, and, intriguingly, a line in the town church record for 1779 indicates that Katurah, “Jer. Osborns Negro,” was baptized that year on March 28. Whether Katurah was in the same household as Ned, or perhaps was the same person, is a question that remains for another day.

If it is not entirely proven that Captain Osborn was a slave-owner, it is clear that his contemporaries were. Among the library’s collections are several records of slave sales in East Hampton. In 1806 Ambrose Parsons sold Cato, age 13, to Lodowick Post of Southampton. As late as 1829, “a certain black girl named Tamer, aged fourteen years,” was sold to John Hedges of East Hampton for $25.

Ned’s life, even the little that is known about it, matters a lot, said Hugh King, the director of the Home, Sweet Home Museum in East Hampton Village. “There aren’t many stories of African-Americans from that time on all of Long Island,” he said.

“There had been some talk of moving him to a more notable place, but once we began to suspect that he was buried on his own land, we recognized that he should remain there,” Mr. Cohen said.

In an email, Mr. Boerner said that the project had been a “win for the restoration of a man’s dignity and place in our collective history, as well as a factual clarification of the complex, still not fully understood slave system here. . . .”

As things stood prior to the restoration effort, the site was indeed town property, but it had been all but overlooked by officials. A narrow path leading from Morris Park Lane had grown over, Mr. Calemmo said, and by 2007, Ned’s headstone had been moved and was left leaning in a corner of a stockade fence.

Mr. Guichay was concerned about what had seemed to him a portion of his own yard, but came around. “He saw the light, so to speak. He was very, very generous,” Mr. Calemmo said.

Today, a white fence surrounds Ned’s headstone, which Mr. Calemmo placed in a bed of gravel more or less where he thought it should go. Recent visitors to the site have suggested that it be turned about 180 degrees to catch the evening light, as had been tradition.

Jeremiah Osborn’s death, at the age of 67, came about a year before Ned’s, according to Jeannette Edwards Rattray’s “East Hampton History and Genealogies.” In the church records for 1817, the year Ned died, there was only a single entry. It was not his.

“This is a part of history that has been forgotten in East Hampton, but we found it. We’ve found this fellow,” Mr. Calemmo said.