Locust Grove Cemetery
Shippensburg, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Burial ground for slaves and free blacks since the early 19th century and site of Shippensburg's first African American church, established 1830s. Edward Shippen Burd granted the land to Shippensburg's African American community in 1842. It was the only public cemetery open to African Americans in the area until the late 20th century. Graves of veterans from the Civil War to the Vietnam conflict include those of twenty-six Civil War soldiers.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Since the early 19th century, Locust Grove Cemetery has been the resting place of enslaved and free Black residents of the Shippensburg area, and the site of the town's first African American church, founded in the 1830s. In 1842 Edward Shippen Burd granted the land to the local Black community, and for well over a century it remained the only public cemetery in the area open to African Americans. Among its graves are twenty-six Civil War soldiers, alongside veterans of every American conflict through Vietnam.
Why it matters
The cemetery is a tangible record of an African American community's endurance across slavery, freedom, and generations of military service, when even burial grounds were segregated.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Locust Grove Cemetery reaches back into the early nineteenth century, a period when Pennsylvania was a free state but the country around it was anything but settled on the question of slavery. Free Black communities in southern Pennsylvania lived in a border region β close to slaveholding territory, shaped by both the promise of freedom and the constant pressures and dangers that came with it.
Shippensburg, in the Cumberland Valley, was one of many such towns where African Americans β some free, some formerly enslaved β built lives, worked, worshiped, and formed institutions of their own. In the 1830s the community established Shippensburg's first African American church here, a landmark of self-determination at a time when Black residents were routinely excluded from white institutions.
That exclusion extended even to the ground itself. In an era of pervasive segregation, where a community could bury its dead was not a given, and a burial ground open to Black residents was both a practical necessity and a hard-won assertion of dignity.
People & events
The cemetery had served as a burial ground for enslaved and free Black people since the early nineteenth century, but a pivotal moment came in 1842, when Edward Shippen Burd granted the land to Shippensburg's African American community. That grant gave the community secure claim to a place of its own β a church site and a burial ground bound together as the heart of Black life in the area.
For well over a century afterward, Locust Grove carried a heavy distinction: it was the only public cemetery in the area open to African Americans until the late twentieth century. Generation after generation, this was where the community laid its dead, because segregation left them nowhere else. That continuity makes the ground itself a record of the community's endurance.
Among those buried here are veterans of every American conflict from the Civil War through Vietnam β including the graves of twenty-six Civil War soldiers. Those Civil War graves are especially telling: they mark men who took up arms in the struggle over slavery and union, and who came home to be honored in the one ground their community could call its own.
Its place in the American story
Locust Grove tells, in a single plot of Pennsylvania earth, a story that runs the length of the American experience β slavery and freedom, faith and community, service and segregation. It stands for the countless African American communities that built enduring institutions in the face of exclusion, and whose history is written as much in their churches and cemeteries as in any archive.
The twenty-six Civil War soldiers here connect this ground to one of the central facts of that war: that Black Americans fought for the Union and for freedom, and did so knowing their own status hung in the balance. That such veterans, and later veterans of every conflict through Vietnam, rest in a segregated burial ground captures a painful national truth β that Black Americans served a country that too often refused them equal treatment, in life and even in death.
As a place, the cemetery also embodies why physical sites matter to history. A community's endurance across generations is abstract until you stand where its people are buried. Locust Grove makes that endurance concrete, and insists that it be remembered.
If you visit
Approach Locust Grove as the sacred, still-tended ground it is. This is a working cemetery and a memorial at once, so walk quietly and with respect for the families whose loved ones rest here.
Take time to notice the span of the graves β how they reach across generations and across America's wars. The Civil War soldiers' graves in particular reward a slow, attentive pause; standing before them, you are close to men who lived through slavery, freedom, and the fight that decided the difference. Let the marker's mention of a church established here in the 1830s help you picture this not just as a burial ground but as the center of a whole community's life.
If you are traveling the Cumberland Valley, this makes a meaningful and grounding stop β a place to slow down and reckon with a history that is often overlooked. Come to listen rather than to hurry, and leave the ground as undisturbed as you found it.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the markerβs inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Plan your visit
NearbyMake a day of it β museums, food, and places to stay near this marker.
Museums & culture
- Appalachian Trail Museum11.2 mi away
Places data Β© OpenStreetMap contributors. Hours and details change β call ahead.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- Β· Edward Shippen Burd
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Martin Delany (1812-1885)
Chambersburg, PA Β· est. 2003
Educated in Chambersburg as the son of a free mother and an enslaved father, Martin Delany became one of the most formidable Black voices of his century. He published the antislavery newspaper The Mystery, joined Frederick Douglass in the abolitionist cause, and in 1865 became the first African American commissioned as a field officer in the United States Army. Physician, editor, and activist, he pressed for freedom on many fronts.
John Brown Raid
Mont Alto, PA Β· est. 1947
After John Brown's failed raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in October 1859, several of his followers scattered north in a desperate bid to escape. Captain John E. Cooke was run down near here on October 25, nine days after the raid collapsed, and was returned to Virginia, where he was hanged on December 16βtwo weeks after Brown himself went to the gallows. The manhunt reached well into Pennsylvania as the nation reeled from the raid.
Lincoln Cemetery
Gettysburg, PA Β· est. 2003
Founded in 1867 by the Sons of Good Will, Lincoln Cemetery gave Gettysburg's African American citizens and soldiers a dignified resting place they were otherwise denied. Roughly thirty veterans of the United States Colored Troops lie here β men who fought for the Union but were barred by segregation from burial in the town's famous National Cemetery. Later generations of Black veterans from the Spanish-American War through Korea joined them in ground first known as Good Will Cemetery and renamed for Lincoln in 1920.
Gettysburg Campaign
Greene Township, PA Β· est. 1947
In late June 1863, Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia poured north into Pennsylvania, and General Richard S. Ewell's corps marched this road bound for Carlisle with orders to threaten the state capital at Harrisburg. Before he could strike, Ewell was recalled on June 29 to concentrate with Lee near Cashtown. Within days those converging roads would funnel both armies into the fields around Gettysburg.