Map Outline of CEMETERIES OF WANTAGH
THE CEMETERIES OF OLD JERUSALEM
Until the nineteenth century there was no Wantagh nor North Wantagh --
only a tract of land about five miles from north to south,
and about two miles from east to west known as Jerusalem.
The arrival of the Long Island Railroad and the formation of the
present school districts split up the area.
Jerusalem was settled in 1644 by Captain John Seaman and Robert Jackson.
Captain Seaman built his house north of the present
Jerusalem Avenue, and to the east of the present Wantagh Avenue,
about where the Dauernheim greenhouses stand in -1976.
Robert Jackson built several hundred feet to the south.
Of Seaman's eight sons, five settled to the north, and Thomas,
the sixth, stayed in the old homestead. The Jackson descendants
moved to the area to the south. According to an account written by a
Seaman descendant in the History of Queens County, published by
W. W. Munsell in 1882, the Seamans generally buried on the farms of the
descendants of Benjamin and Thomas. However, by 1880 the farms had
passed into the hands of strangers, and all signs of those burials had
vanished.
The Jackson dead were also interred on family farms, until the
Jackson burial ground was started. There is little physical evidence
left of any very early burials either by the two original families,
or the other families that came in the seventeenth and eighteenth
century. Although it is said that there were as many as eleven burying
grounds in Wantagh, we have definite knowledge of only a few.
The four cemeteries of Wantagh are
JACKSON CEMETERY
JERUSALEM SOCIETY OF FRIENDS CEMETERY
RIERSON BURIAL PLOT
ST. JOHN OF JERUSALEM CEMETERY INC.
Source:
Old Burying Ground
Oakfield Avenue, Wantagh, N.Y.
By: Karl F. Pfeiffer
Wantagh American Revolution Bicentennial Committee
(Bellmore Library, Bellmore.N.Y.)
Transcribed by Nancy E Lutz
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