“Summer or winter, whenever you go to it, you find it in perfect order and neat and clean as the lawn of the most pretentious private residence.”

         Those words, written by J. Percy Hart in his 1904 book, “History and Directory of the Three Towns,” described Bridgeport Cemetery, one of Brownsville’s oldest burying grounds.  Hart wrote, “Situated on an eminence on the southeast part of Bridgeport, sloping gently [downward] to the north and overlooking the valley of the Nemacolin and in plain view of the National Pike where it passes over the Brubaker hill, is the Bridgeport cemetery, one of the most delightful plots of ground and one of the best kept cemeteries along the Monongahela river.”
         Some residents of the Brownsville area are not aware of Bridgeport Cemetery and know nothing of its significance in the community’s history.  In a series of articles which begins today, we will tell the story of Bridgeport Cemetery.  There are several questions we can answer for those who know little about this historic cemetery.  Where is it located?  Was it Bridgeport’s very first burying ground?  How did it become the borough’s official graveyard?  Who owns Bridgeport Cemetery today? Are burials still conducted there?  What will become of this forgotten witness to Brownsville’s past?
         It is understandable that many residents of Brownsville, particularly those of the younger generations, may never have seen Bridgeport Cemetery.  It is not located along a well-traveled road.  To reach Bridgeport Cemetery by automobile, a motorist who begins at the Brownsville Municipal Building must drive up High Street hill to the first intersection, then turn left onto Angle Street.  The motorist then travels eastward on Angle Street past the intersection with Pearl Street, continues around the bend to the “Y” in the road, and bears right onto Cemetery Road.  Bridgeport Cemetery lies approximately 300 yards down Cemetery Road, just beyond the Snowdon Terrace public housing development.
         J. Percy Hart’s description of Bridgeport Cemetery’s lovely view of the “valley of the Nemacolin” was accurate when he wrote it in 1904, but it is no longer true today.  At the time Hart was writing, Dunlap’s Creek, as it flowed toward the Monongahela River, split into two channels when it was about one quarter mile from reaching the river.  These two branches then meandered westward through a wide flat valley that separated two high hills lying to the valley’s north and south.  When the two streams were approximately one hundred yards from the Monongahela River, the northernmost branch curved back southward in order to get past the “Neck,” a peninsula of land that protruded from the northern hills parallel to the river.  The Neck sat higher than the Dunlap’s Creek flood plain to its east and the Monongahela River to its west.  The abrupt southward curve of the northern branch of the creek enabled it to rejoin the southern branch and form a single channel for the final one hundred yards to the river.
         On those opposite hills overlooking Dunlap’s Creek valley, two different towns were founded in the late 1700's.  On the northern hillside, Thomas Brown founded the town of Brownsville in 1785, a town that later encompassed the “Neck” within its boundaries.  On the hillside south of the valley, Rees Cadwallader created the town of Bridgeport in 1794.  Separating these two towns was the wide flood plain along Dunlap’s Creek, a stream that was originally called Nemacolin’s Creek.
         With this background in mind, we can reconsider what J. Percy Hart meant when he described Bridgeport Cemetery as “overlooking the valley of the Nemacolin.”  The “Nemacolin” to which Hart referred was Dunlap’s Creek, and the view he mentioned was of the picturesque twin-streamed flood plain.  The western end of that flood plain, the part that lay nearest the Neck, was called Krepps’s Bottom.  A visitor standing in Bridgeport Cemetery in 1904 would have seen it by gazing westward toward the Neck.
         The panoramic view from Bridgeport Cemetery that Hart described in 1904 changed dramatically twelve years after he wrote those words.  In 1916, Brownsville banker Charles Snowdon financed a venture to dump loads of slag into Krepps’s Bottom.  This project raised the elevation of Krepps’s Bottom until it was at street-level with the existing Neck shopping district.  Snowdon’s innovative move created plenty of valuable new commercial property which he owned, land into which the growing Brownsville business district could expand.  He named his annex to the business district “Snowdon Place.”
         The filling of Krepps’s Bottom changed the appearance of Hart’s “valley of the Nemacolin” forever.  Today the wintertime view from the cemetery includes both the Dunlap’s Creek valley and, to the west, manmade Snowdon Square.  In 1904, the hillside that led downward from the cemetery toward the “valley of the Nemacolin” was relatively bare.  Today it is blanketed with trees, so that in the summer when the woods are in full leaf, any view of the valley is now completely obscured by foliage.
         We have described the location of Bridgeport Cemetery, and we have explored the fact that it was chosen partly for its picturesque view of the valley, a view that has since changed considerably.  Now we can turn to another question that might be posed by anyone who is curious about Bridgeport Cemetery; namely, was it Bridgeport’s first cemetery?
         We can start to answer that question by noting that Rees Cadwallader, founder of Bridgeport, was a Quaker, a religious sect that was more formally known as the Society of Friends.  When Cadwallader first purchased the land that later became Bridgeport, he originally named his parcel of land “Peace,” a name that reflected the pacifist views of the Society of Friends.  Nearly every early settler of Bridgeport was a Quaker, and this becomes very relevant in researching the location of the town’s first cemetery.
         The Bridgeport Quakers built their first “meeting house,” or house of worship, on the spot where the Prospect Street school later stood.  Adjacent to that meeting house, just south of the building, the Quakers also created the town’s first burying ground.  Most Quakers do not believe in the use of tombstones, and the graves in that first cemetery were unmarked.  Since most, if not all, of the earliest settlers of Bridgeport were Quakers, most of them were buried in that cemetery that lay between Prospect and Cadwallader streets.
         In later centuries, on the same site where the Quaker meeting house had once stood, several buildings were built in succession, including Bridgeport High School (which burned down in 1908), Prospect Street school (which replaced it and was torn down in recent years), and now the Brownsville Apartments building.  But what became of the cemetery?
         It is very likely that the bodies of most of Bridgeport’s original Quaker settlers are still there.  There is no reason to believe that the bodies that were buried next to the meeting house were ever removed.  In fact, sometime around the late 1950's, the Brownsville School District, which operated Prospect Street elementary school at the time, wrote a letter to the regional governing body of the Society of Friends (because Brownsville no longer had an active Quaker “meeting” in town by then).  The letter requested the Society’s permission to lay asphalt over the old cemetery in order for the students at the adjacent Prospect Street school to have a hard-surfaced playground.
         I have seen a copy of the reply that was sent to the school district by the Society of Friends officials.  The officials said that in their opinion, the Friends who were buried there many years ago would probably have preferred to have a playground full of laughing children above them rather than the thick tangle of briars and brambles that had overgrown the graveyard.  With the blessing of the Society of Friends, the cemetery was paved.
         This background information answers the question of whether Bridgeport Cemetery was the borough’s first burying ground – it was not.  That distinction goes to the original Friends’ burying ground that still lies unmarked between Prospect and Cadwallader Streets.  A question that would naturally follow this conclusion is, when did the first burial take place on the land where Bridgeport Cemetery is located today?
        According to Brownsville’s David Gratz, who is the current president of the Bridgeport Cemetery Company, the year when the first body was buried on those grounds is not clear.  What can be stated for certain is that in the mid-nineteenth century, Bridgeport borough council decided that there was a definite need to purchase property for a public town cemetery.
         In 1931, Brownsville historian Jesse Coldren spent many months meticulously transcribing faded handwritten minutes of Brownsville and Bridgeport town council meetings, some of them dating as far back as 1814.  Mr. Coldren created typewritten copies of the minutes, thereby preserving them for use by future generations.  Now, thanks to his efforts, we are able to go back 155 years into the records and examine the minutes of those mid-nineteenth century Bridgeport borough council meetings.
         We are looking for mention of the creation of a new town cemetery for Bridgeport, and  it is in the council minutes of September 14, 1847 that our search bears fruit.  In those ancient notes we find the first evidence that Bridgeport council was considering the purchase of land where a public graveyard could be established for use by borough residents.  Next week, we will extract from those council minutes the details of the creation of Bridgeport Cemetery.
         We will also describe the unusual manner in which that purchase was to be financed, and we will seek reader help to determine the definition of a word that I have never seen before and does not appear in a modern dictionary, a word whose meaning is critical to understanding how the money was raised to purchase the land for the cemetery.