Every day, thousands of commuters pass through the Secaucus interchange on the New Jersey Turnpike. They do this without knowing that the ground beneath the ramps, the rail platforms, and the transfer station once held more than four thousand bodies. They were buried in unmarked shafts over the course of eight decades and largely forgotten by the time the state decided to build a highway on top of them.
The site is formally known as the Hudson County Burial Grounds. It is more commonly remembered as the Secaucus Potter’s Field, or by its older and somewhat eerier name, Snake Hill Cemetery.
The term “potter’s field” itself dates to antiquity. It is drawn from the biblical account of Akeldama, the field purchased with the coins paid to Judas Iscariot for his betrayal of Jesus and subsequently used to bury strangers and the indigent. In American cities, the designation came to describe municipal burial grounds reserved for residents who died without family or means to arrange a private funeral. Nearly every major city has maintained one at some point in its history. Manhattan’s Washington Square Park and Bryant Park both originated as potter’s fields. New York City continues to operate one today on Hart Island in the Bronx, where more than 800,000 people have been interred. New Jersey has several of its own, including a largely undocumented plot in Sussex County behind a former Alms House and an unmarked acre in Mount Laurel that does not appear on standard mapping services. None, however, achieved the notoriety of the burial ground in Secaucus, owing to the scale of what occurred when the state moved to reclaim the land.
The origins of the site trace back to the Snake Hill region of Secaucus, which by the late eighteenth century was home to the Old Bergen Poor Farm. When the southern portion of Bergen County was reorganized as Hudson County in 1840, the newly formed county purchased the property and constructed its Insane Asylum and Alms House there. This followed a pattern common to nineteenth-century municipal governance in which the poor farm, the asylum, and the burial ground for the indigent were situated in close proximity, serving overlapping and often invisible populations. The cemetery itself opened in 1880 and for the following eighty-two years, received the remains of residents from those county institutions who died without relatives or resources to provide for their burial. Many had been patients at the asylum, later renamed Meadowview Psychiatric Hospital; others had lived out their final years at the poor house. Burials continued until 1962, by which time the burial register had accumulated approximately seven thousand names. The county, having long since ceased any active maintenance of the grounds, effectively allowed the site to disappear from public memory. There were no headstones, no markers, and no ongoing care – only an unremarkable stretch of meadowland quietly containing thousands of graves that no one visited…