Along the eastern edge of the Kingsbridge Burial Ground is an area identified as a burial site of enslaved Africans who lived on the Van Cortlandt family plantation and were responsible for its functions and economic gains for over 100 years. Records also indicate that several Indigenous people were enslaved there. Although research is inconclusive, it suggests that enslaved people were interred in this area, supported by wills, land deeds, census data, and estate inventories belonging to the Van Cortlandt family and other local colonial families, as well as the common practice of burying enslaved people adjacent to settlers' cemeteries. Slavery was outlawed in New York State in 1827, and enslaved people on the Van Cortlandt estate were freed in 1821. The adjacent Kingsbridge Burial Ground, dating to the 17th century, was used by some of the area's earliest colonial settlers, including members of the Tippett, Berrian, Betts, Bashford, Ackerman, and Warner families, while members of the Van Cortlandt family are buried at nearby Vault Hill. In the 1870s, workers constructing the New York and Northern Railroad unearthed skeletal remains in this area. In 1879, Caleb Van Tassel recalled making a coffin for a slave buried here, and J.B. James later wrote in his 1935 memoir that many skeletons of former slaves were unearthed during the railroad's construction. In 2019, a USDA geophysical study commissioned by NYC Parks adjacent to the Old Putnam Trail, now the Putnam Greenway, along the former railroad lines used ground-penetrating radar and identified fine linear features resembling coffins 1.2 to 1.5 meters underground.
