Recovering the history of Tabernacle’s AME cemetery

Who held the land?

On October 13, 1868, John and Mary Ann Gray conveyed 1.9 acres, then in Shamong Township, for an African Methodist Episcopal house of worship and burial ground. The Tabernacle Historical Society’s reading of Burlington County deed book C8, page 607 names trustees George Eayers, David Thompson and Stacey Mires; John Gray also appears among the trustees. Spellings of their names vary across later records. The deed establishes a congregation and a place for burial, even though it does not tell us who attended a particular service or when each person was buried.

The society’s census research gives the trustees lives beyond the deed. It identifies Eayers as a Civil War veteran and a Shamong farmer living with children and his mother in 1880; Thompson as a Black farmer living with wife Lucinda and seven children; and Gray as a farm laborer. Those descriptions come from the society’s interpretation of census and military records, which should be checked against the originals before resolving uncertain name spellings or enlistment details.

The church is gone; the cemetery is still used

According to the society, a photograph preserves the frame church, while a 1938 Works Progress Administration veterans’ graveyard map shows its foundation and Eayers’s grave. The later Remember the Forgotten study says the building was demolished in 1935 and that a Free Christian Zion congregation had used it by the early twentieth century. The precise date of that congregation’s beginning is not established. More than 50 grave markers remained visible when the study was prepared, and the study records a burial as recently as 2021.

Finding what a marker cannot show

In 2023 the historical society began Remember the Forgotten with genealogists, descendants, Friendship AME Church members and the Pinelands Commission. Ground-penetrating radar found many subsurface anomalies. The report singles out one near known burials as a possible unmarked grave. Radar alone cannot confirm a burial or name a person; the descendant interviews and documentary work are essential to interpreting the ground.

The study also records that three trustees—Mires, Gray and Thompson—are buried at Jacob’s Chapel in Mount Laurel. Their work helped establish this cemetery, but their own graves are elsewhere. It expressly finds no evidence that the Carranza Road property was a Maroon settlement. The deed and continuing burials support a strong history without adding an unverified settlement story.