The Heather on the Hill — Hibernia Cemetery
(Yes that’s Scottish but there was a cemetery. And a Heather!)
Jaysus, this Irish lass had never been to Hibernia, NJ, even though it’s only 15 minutes from her house! She will now stop typing in third-person brogue.
Moving on … Nothing will get me hiking vertically through a labyrinth of forests like a cemetery. Just like nothing had brought me to Hibernia. But with my faithful companion, Adam McGovern, by my side, we blazed a trail to this lonely graveyard, starting accidentally through someone’s backyard, then up an enormous hill where no one can hear you pant and the Wi-Fi doesn’t work.
Per FindAGrave.com, “Established in 1869, this cemetery … is near the old Hibernia iron mines and many of the miners are doubtless buried here. It requires a hike up a steep trail from Green Pond Rd [that] passes the old mine shaft which is a protected area for bats.”
This is the old mine shaft entrance. Iron mining was huge in Hibernia in the 1800s — so huge that a steam-powered locomotive transported the raw ore underground.
However, this boom town pretty much closed up shop by 1916 when the whole operation packed up and left (Pittsburgh and the Midwest turned out to be more metal). But some time later, bats moved in to the mine shafts, turning this underground lair into what’s known as a bat hibernaculum — a word which sounds somewhat like Hibernia.
At one point 30,000 bats roosted here, though something called White Nose Disease has killed off a large number. I did not see any bats this day though I did dare hold my iPhone 11 (just paid off!) through the metal slats and came up with this stunning image:
Just like Stately Wayne Manor and I’m sure the bats love it. Also my phone made it out alive. With this having been documented, we continued our journey.
This Blair Witch-looking thing let us know we were on the right track, because my GPS certainly didn’t. If it had been nighttime and I saw this I would’ve run home. To Queens, where I used to live. This is known as a cairn, defined as “a mound of rough stones built as a memorial or landmark, typically on a hilltop or skyline.” Or it’s also “a small terrier of a breed with short legs, a longish body, and a shaggy coat.” This looks like rocks dripping green blood. Hibernia!
I didn’t run home to Queens after seeing this, either. Frankly, we’d been hiking so long I was actually relieved to see a sign with an arrow. We’d already survived no bats, so how bad could the rest be?
And here it is. Also known as St Patrick’s Cemetery, it had a corresponding church that burned down in 1910 and was never rebuilt. The last grave I saw was dated 1944, though it looks like most burials ended once the mines closed and people moved away. Someone tended to the grounds because the flags look new. The rest, well … I know the sign reminded me of something.
Current appearances aside, I’ll bet at the time this would have been a lovely place to spend an eternity. High on a hill, reaching toward the heavens, a peaceful alternative to those who were working hundreds, sometimes thousands of feet underground.
Though today the cemetery looks like this. Either these mounds are interred remains, or there had been a body buried in that space between them.
And these are the first graves I tried to read. It’s the Quinn family: At left is son Joseph, then mother Margaret, then the larger one (at one point they were all the same height) is for dad Martin and son James. Both boys died young, Martin died aged 51. I couldn’t tell a date for Margaret, though Joseph was widowed by the 1880 census.
Then there’s this poor soul. It belonged to William Caples, a saloon owner who died in 1874 aged 39 of what was called “dropsy,” now known as a blood clot. This is what his grave looked like in 2009 when it was uploaded to FindAGrave.
And this is what it looks like now. You can actually still make out the name “William” if you look at the piece of stone at the right and turn your head slightly to the left.
William Caples is buried next to his son, John Caples, who died aged 22 in 1892.
There’s a green carnation because we were there just after St Patrick’s Day. Someone(s) is looking out for this place.
Given the surroundings, this gravesite stood out. It’s for John Heslin, his wife Catharine, and, with barely enough room, his second wife, Mary. John Heslin wasn’t a miner either, but owned the Heslin Hotel, which was actually more like a saloon.
FindAGrave.com can be a great resource, especially for this cemetery, but it bears fact-checking. Repeatedly. Here’s the family of John Heslin’s wife, Mary Galligan, also buried at Hibernia. Except here they’re called Callican.
There are plenty of Irish graves here, which makes sense at St Patrick’s Cemetery in Hibernia. Flanigan, Malone, Dempsey … and those are just the ones we know.
On October 7, 2003, a headline blared across the front page of the Daily Record:
Someone reported a “disturbance” and called the police. The caretaker said that a three-foot hole had been dug at the resting place of miner Oliver Tuite, his wife Bridget Tuite, and Rose Gaffney. About Rose Gaffney, the reporter wrote that the “relationship … could not be determined.” Well, I determined it, she was Bridget’s sister. Their maiden name was Kelly.
Luckily the miscreants got away empty-handed, though this was not the first time people dabbled in the dark arts or drank too much Rumple Minze at Hibernia Cemetery. In the same article it’s mentioned that seven years earlier (1996), vandals dug up the bodies of Thomas and Margaret Flanigan. Whether they actually took them isn’t clear, though I believe that would be tough to do on this hill. The gravesite is still there.
(Hibernia Cemetery Trivia: The Flanigans’ great-granddaughter, Lisa Flanigan Salberg, was born with a genetic heart condition (this article says her great-grandmother also died of dropsy, though I don’t know if it’s Margaret Flanigan). Salberg got a heart transplant, and started the Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Association which has 12,000 Facebook followers. Salberg’s also quoted in the Daily Record grave robbing article: “These people are sick.”)
Despite this instance, overall St Patrick’s Cemetery has gotten little coverage in the press. Perhaps because of its location. Since I moved to New Jersey in 2018 after being gone for 25 years, I’ve found that it’s hard to generate much outside curiosity in it. (Yeah, you see me NYC!)
And I know I take more of an interest in burial grounds than many, but this is really an undiscovered gem. And probably still will be because I’m the one covering it on Medium and I just got dropped from their payment program for having too few followers.
And yet, those who have endeavored to write about Hibernia Cemetery have gotten it wrong. Starting with this being the cemetery for miners and their families. Hibernia had more than miners. People had to eat, and drink … booze especially. Hardly any of the houses had running water so it was easier to drink at the bar. Heck, one of the first graves we saw was for Caples the saloon owner and Heslin the hotel owner.
Here’s James Dempsey’s grave. He was also a saloon owner (a contemporary of Caples and Heslin) with an impressive gravesite in what looks like a family plot. However, his is the only name even though he was married with two daughters when he died in 1886. Dempsey’s wife, Alice, labeled “insane” in the 1880 census, would end up institutionalized at Greystone Manor in Parsippany, NJ. From what I read it sounded like Alice Dempsey suffered from severe post-partum depression, and even FindAGrave concurred.
The other error that’s repeated? That those buried here were Irish and Hungarian. Someone wrote this and it just got copied without anyone hiking up the hill to have a look. I don’t know any Hungarians (I think) besides Ernie Kovacs and Zsa Zsa Gabor and even I knew these headstones are not written in Hungarian. Hungarian is one of only six non-Indo-European languages in Europe and you can tell. Also? There’s Google Translate. Trial and error with Tu spociva (“Here rests”) taught me the people buried in this part of the cemetery were Slovak.
At the turn of the 19th century, Irish miners (and English, Scottish, and Welsh, who are also buried here) were moving on to other lines of work and newer immigrants — Slovaks — were taking their place. Slovaks who lived in the then-Kingdom of Hungary but were not Hungarian. In fact, according to the Library of Congress, “Slovak and other ethnic leaders in the United States sucessfully petitioned federal authorities to classify a person by his or her language rather than country of origin. On [President Taft’s] orders, new forms replaced the old ones, and Slovaks were no longer classified as ‘Austrians’ or ‘Hungarians’ in the 1910 U.S. Census.” By 1910 they were Slovak/Hungarian.
The Slovak graves are mostly at the back of Hibernia Cemetery, which is possibly where space was made for them after the Irish/English/Welsh were buried in front. There’s a definite metallic theme to their graves.
Over the years the cemetery has been brutalized and headstones dismantled and stolen. Once a headstone is knocked off its pedestal, it’s tremendously difficult to right it because of its weight. A vandalized cemetery is a sad thing, indeed, especially if it includes the grave of a child.
Since there was a toy Hess truck here I thought this was also the grave of a child. Actually, it’s the grave of (roughly) 33-year-old Jacob Krisanda, who, if you’re to believe a June 10th, 1902 edition of the Passaic Daily News, showed up at a church in Passaic intending to marry a woman named Anna, only to be summoned outside by the law and a woman named Agnes, who charged him with the crime of “seduction.” (I plead guilty! — Ed.)
In Judge Richmond’s office across the street, Krisanda was given an ultimatum: that one or this one. Or more precisely, “Get married or go to jail.” Krisanda was quoted as saying, “Well it don’t make much difference to me. A woman is a woman, no matter what her name may be.” [I think some liberties may have been taken with this quote and the ladies.] The judge married Jakub and Agnes in his office, and Jakub left Anna at the altar. I’m surprised his grave wasn’t toppled.
Next to Jakub Krisanda’s grave was that of Jozef Svjenty. On on October 19, 1911 he went off to work at the mines and never came home.
Neither did 11 other men, after a blast let loose millions of gallons of water that no one knew had been collecting in a nearby abandoned mine. This is the only stone that I could find of the 12 victims, and it’s exceptionally grand for this cemetery. The only way I believe that Josef Svjenty’s family — who were Slovak immigrants — could afford this was from the $718.18 the Wharton Steel Company paid them in a settlement. (FYI — There’s a Wharton, NJ nearby.)
This is a reminder that mining was a deadly line of work. My great-great uncle, Thomas Quinlan, survived WWI but died in the mines in Lancashire, England. And the men were criminally underpaid, paying rent on homes with no electricity or running water that were owned by the mining companies, and barely making enough to get ahead. How any of these miners were able to afford headstones at all is practically a miracle. It’s not surprising that so many have a piece of iron marking that they are here and they once were.
In 2017 the Friendly Sons of St Patrick of Morris County gathered together to clean things up, an endeavor which was covered in the Daily Record (the one publication that does refer to Slovak miners as Slovak, though it doesn’t mention that they’re also buried here). According to the article, “The group wants to replace the perimeter fencing and the wooden sign with a permanent marker for both the church and the cemetery. They’ll also attempt to gather as many records as possible of the people who are buried there and put it on their Friendly Sons website, creating a record of all the people who are buried there.” I haven’t seen a new sign or perimeter, and most if not all of the graves are already on FindAGrave, but these are worthy endeavors nonetheless. Since they haven’t happened yet, I’ll blame Covid.
This is what part of the perimeter looks like now. I actually think it fits the site’s history. It also reminds me of Katherine Helmond’s facelift in Brazil. If you’re old enough to know what I mean, you’re old enough.
Other organizations (I believe the Boy Scouts?) have placed wooden white crosses at spots where headstones used to be, but even those have been stolen or tossed aside. What does the future hold for Hibernia Cemetery? You tell me. Should it be a documentary? Maybe since I’m already doing a documentary on a cemetery, I might start with a short one.
It was getting dark and so time to leave Hibernia Cemetery because we had to account for five-ish hours of getting lost. This cemetery may not be in great shape right now, but I’ve seen worse. Much worse. Stay tuned for more information on this semi-ghost town and its graveyard.
Until next time …
