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From
DNA Info:
Thieves have been stealing bronze vases attached to memorial markers from Maple Grove Cemetery to sell them as scrap.
The problem at the Kew Gardens resting place started a little more than five years ago, as first reported by the New York Post. About 500 vases have been stolen so far, according to Bonnie Dixon, general manager at the cemetery.
“It’s just so disturbing,” Dixon said. “I can’t imagine how anybody would do that but people do and it's sad.”
The vases, which are engraved with the letters "MG" for Maple Grove, cost about $250 each and weigh about 2.5 pounds, Dixon said.
A pound of bronze sells for about $1.20 to $1.50, according to local scrap metal buyers.
From the
Queens Chronicle:
After 10 months of research, a volunteer Queens historian has uncovered an African burial ground at a Kew Gardens cemetery.
Carl Ballenas last week announced the discovery after investigating a mysterious monument near the Lefferts Boulevard entrance to Maple Grove Cemetery. Armed only with the stone’s vague inscription — “Removals from church vaults at the corner of Prince and Marion streets New York, February 1877” — Ballenas, a social studies teacher who donates his time to Maple Grove, set out to determine the contents below the monument and the narrative behind it.
“It’s a phenomenal thing — history being brought to life here and it was right under our noses,” he noted with a laugh.
The monument is believed to be the marker of the burial site of 308 members of the First Colored Presbyterian Church, which was established in 1822 by the Rev. Samuel Cornish and more commonly known as the Shiloh Presbyterian Church. It was part of the Underground Railroad network of people and places that helped slaves escape, and relocated throughout Manhattan several times, including to a building at the corner of Prince and Marion streets, where it operated for nearly 30 years.
Ballenas said that according to Maple Grove’s interment records, in 1877, the church’s burial vaults were moved to the Queens cemetery, which was just two years old at the time. “Note — Int. 29 — 308 removals from the Presbyt. Ch. Vault New York City, corner of Prince and Marion St.,” reads a note in the 1877 interment ledger.
