Locust Grove Cemetery, Shippensburg

On the north side of Shippensburg stands a small cemetery that has been a gathering place for the town's Black community since the early eighteen hundreds. Enslaved and free Black residents were buried here from the start, and in the eighteen thirties the site also became home to Shippensburg's first African American church.

In eighteen forty-two, Edward Shippen Burd formally granted the land to the community, securing their right to it in writing. For more than a century it remained the only public burial ground in the area open to African Americans. Today the graves include those of twenty-six Civil War soldiers, spanning wars from that conflict through Vietnam, a record of service stretching across generations in a community that had to fight for the right to simply rest in peace in their own town.