The North Queen Street Cemetery and the African-American Experience in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania

Sometime in the eighteenth century, that piece of rocky ground on the outskirts of the town became a graveyard for the area’s slaves, and by the 1830s, it also provided a site for the community’s first African-American church. For most of the nineteenth century, that space served as the social, cultural, and spiritual center of the town’s growing African-American population, a place where they could celebrate, mourn, and build together the foundations of an African-American community. 2