MADISON - An African-American Civil War soldier, a congressman key to the vote to abolish slavery and a “gypsy king.”
These are just some of the notable denizens of the historic Hillside Cemetery, located across from Madison Junior School on Main Street.
Established in the 1740s on the original site of the Presbyterian Church of Madison, the town’s oldest civic organization, the cemetery is nearly 150 years older than the borough itself. Revolutionary War soldiers lay there beside the town’s early leaders and people who played fascinating roles in the major events of the past three centuries.
“If you see a street name in town, they’re probably buried there,” Jim Burnet told the Madison Rotary at a club meeting on Thursday, Sept. 9.
Burnet, the borough’s chief financial officer and a member of the Presbyterian Church of Madison, volunteers with the church to preserve and celebrate the cemetery’s history. Generations of the Burnet family are buried in the cemetery, with one of its oldest markers belonging to Aaron Burnet Sr., Burnet’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, interred in 1755.
A 10th generation Madisonian, Burnet managed to cover nearly 300 years of borough history in a roughly 20-minute presentation to Rotary members.
Madison, he explained, basically began with the cemetery.
Local residents, tired of schlepping to the Presbyterian Church in Whippany, founded their own congregation at the site in the First Presbyterian Church of South Hanover in 1749 under the leadership of the Rev. Azariah Horton. Aaron Burr Sr., father of the eponymous statesman of the same name who killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel, called on Horton to serve as the church’s pastor, Burnet explained.
Horton would lead the church for 25 years before retiring a few months after the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Burnet said. He came out of retirement shortly thereafter, however, to tend to soldiers and residents suffering from Smallpox brought to the area by the Continental Army, but died of the disease in March 1777. He is officially considered a Revolutionary War veteran due to his service to the army, Burnet explained, and his distinctive tabletop gravestone can be found at Hillside Cemetery.
Civil War Figures
Rev. Horton was just one of several notable residents whose histories Burnet examined in his presentation.
Another was “unlikely Civil War hero” Isaac Gordon. Gordon, an African-American slave, provided information to the Union Army in 1862 to help repel a Confederate attack. He would continue to serve in the army as a guide, and later came to Madison with Union General Robert Brown Potter, according to his grave marker.
As a Madison resident, Gordon served as a coachman and servant for the general until his death in 1917. His obituary in this newspaper noted that he was liked and well-respected by all around town. It is assumed the Potter family arranged for the burial, Burnet said.
Noting Gordon was one of the first African-Americans buried at Hillside, Burnet said the grave is among the most visited in the cemetery.
“People go up there and we find flowers on the grave and we don’t know where they came from,” he said. “We find other things on the grave and we don’t know where they came from, either.”
Another Civil War figure interred in the burial ground is George Yeaman.
A pro-Union Congressman from Kentucky, Yeaman lost his bid for re-election in the middle of the Civil War in 1864. As a lame-duck congressman, he voted in January 1865 in favor of the 13th Amendment to abolish slavery. Depicted by character actor Michael Stuhlbarg in the 2012 film “Lincoln,” Yeaman’s last-minute decision to vote in favor is one of the most climactic scenes in the movie.
As “persona non grata” in Kentucky, he was appointed U.S. Minister to Denmark in 1865 as part of a quid pro quo deal for his “yes” vote in Congress, Burnet said. He later became a constitutional law professor at Columbia University in New York, and purchased a country home in Madison that still stands on Green Avenue. He founded the Madison Golf Club in 1896, two years before his death and burial at Hillside Cemetery.
A Hero Nurse, A Gypsy King
Amid titans of industry and other movers and shakers, Hillside Cemetery also holds the grave of Amabel Scharff Roberts, the first American nurse to die in World War I. Roberts contracted blood poisoning while treating the wounded as a Red Cross nurse in Etretat, France, in 1918.
As a carriage carried her casket through the streets of Etretat, nearly 500 American and British soldiers stood at attention at either side of the road, and a train of nurses, officers, residents and local officials participated in the procession. Roberts is recognized with a plaque at the Madison Health Department recognizing her for her service to the country.
Burnet also spoke of Naylor Harrison, the so-called “king of the gypsies” who would make Madison their temporary home at times throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Burnet recalled a comical story relayed to him by his grandfather, who once suggested to Harrison, “an exceptionally wealthy gentleman,” that he take the $10,000 cash he had stored in his wagon and instead deposit it in a local bank. Harrison and his band would set up their wagon camps on the outskirts of Madison near Florham Park, Burnet said.
Harrison, heeding the advice, deposited the large sum of money in the bank and left town shortly thereafter, as was his custom. Upon returning from a horse-trading trip in Florida, however, he was upset to learn that the bank did not have enough money on-hand to withdraw the entire $10,000 for him all at once.
The bank was ultimately able to cobble together the funds for Harrison, who simply took the cash back to his wagon, counted every dollar to make sure it was all there, and returned it to the bank the next day.
Every year after that, Burnet said, the bank would go to his grandfather to ask him when Harrison would be back in town so they could make sure they had the money.
The Dead Return... Again
The remains of all these fascinating figures can only be found, thankfully, below ground – where we like them. But that wasn’t the case on Aug. 11, 1902, and, in a way, it won’t be the case on Mischief Night this year.
Burnet recounted the macabre tale of the 1902 Hillside Cemetery washout, in which torrential rain caused a pipe to burst under the cemetery, leading several decomposed bodies to wash down Spring Garden Brook all the way down to the current site of Main Street Submarines.
Residents “had to wade through floodwaters and mud to retrieve rotting corpses that separated from their coffins,” Burnet said, showcasing a photo of a half-exposed casket in the cemetery.
The event made the New York newspapers. One worker who helped to clean the site, Dugald MacDougall, reported hearing an “awful, hair-raising noise,” which he found to be the wind whistling through the exposed throat of a corpse that was strewn upright in a bush.
“I never heard a sound like it before or since,” MacDougall is reported as saying.
The dead will return to the world of the living on Saturday, Oct. 30, but in a decidedly less grotesque fashion.
Residents are invited to attend a haunted Mischief Night tour of the cemetery, in which costumed volunteers will portray some of Hillside Cemetery’s notable residents. Registration for the event is not yet open, but residents are invited to email Burnet at jimburnet@gmail.com for more information.
To view the Rotary presentation, visit the club’s website at www.madisonrotarynj.org.
Editor's note: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that George Yeaman was an ancestor of Jim Burnet.
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