Searching for Seneca Village

Since the early 1990s, historians and archaeologists have worked to uncover and reveal the story of Seneca Village. Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar were the first to study it in detail in The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (1992), and in 1997 the New-York Historical Society expanded public knowledge through the exhibit Before Central Park: The Life and Death of Seneca Village, curated by Grady Turner and Cynthia Copeland. Inspired by this work, archaeologists and historians led by Diana Wall and Nan Rothschild formed the Seneca Village project, now the Institute of Seneca Village History, and after years of planning, research, and preliminary testing, excavated residential areas of the village in the summer of 2011, uncovering significant remnants. Additional research and archaeological testing by the Central Park Conservancy in 2015 added to knowledge of Seneca Village, especially its relationship to the history and landscape of Central Park. Understanding of the community comes from condemnation maps completed in 1855, the New York State census of the same year, federal censuses, church records, tax records, municipal death records, newspaper articles, and documents related to the creation of Central Park, though no photographs of the village have been found. The 2011 excavations involved eight weeks of work and produced several thousand artifacts and other cultural materials, including household objects such as dishes, drinking glasses, tobacco pipes, medicine bottles, buttons, combs, pencils, sewing tools, and shoes, as well as bricks and stones from home construction. Analysis of these materials supports the view that Seneca Village was a relatively stable and predominately middle-class community rather than a community of poor squatters. Central Park is a protected historic landscape, and work in the area is planned with regard for the site’s history and the possibility of additional archaeological remains. The exact origin of the name Seneca Village is unknown. Thomas McClure Peters of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church recorded the name while describing the community in derogatory terms, and theories about its origin include a slur referring to the Native American Seneca people, an uplifting reference within the African-American community to Seneca Falls and abolitionism, or a reference to the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca. Several nineteenth-century sources instead referred to the community as part of Yorkville.

New York, New York · United States