Beatrice Keith (1905-1992)
There was an article in the Asbury Park Press on 11 Jan 2009 about the Rose Hill, or Barnegat Hill, Cemetery. The Keith family is mentioned in this article:
"On a cold and rainy day in early January, no time to be tramping around an old cemetery at dusk, Greg Ronan has come to explain a few things about this place. It is important to him. "The last one buried here was over a year ago," he says. "Tyrone dug the grave. He dug all the graves. He dug the last one, right over there." Ronan walks over to a light-colored patch of dirt that remains unmarked. Tyrone Palmer died last year. After he died, Yvonne Calhoun, his longtime partner, moved to Georgia to live with her daughter.
Barnegat Hill Cemetery, once known as Rose Hill Cemetery, had lost the last of its caretakers, its last trustee. Now it's just a small lot, maybe three-quarters of an acre, surrounded by a chain-link fence.
Many of the gravestones are either gone or broken, the result of numerous episodes of vandalism over the years.
On a cold and rainy day, it looks like a lonely place to be buried.
It wasn't always this way.
At one time, this was a peace-ful place in a pastoral setting. Also, it was the only place in Barnegat where a black person could be buried.
The cemetery, which dates back to the 1920s, was located off a dirt path, later known as Rose Hill Road, not far from the AME Methodist church. The church burned down in the 1950s, some older residents told the Press in 1991. Now those people are gone, and no one remembers much about the Methodist church. Unless someone preserves Barnegat Hill Cemetery, it too will be forgotten some day, along with all the history buried there. "After Yvonne left, I thought, "What's going to happen now?' " Ronan wonders. "If anything happened to me, nobody would be around to take care of it." Ronan got involved five years ago, by accident. He bumped into Yvonne Calhoun one morning at a convenience store, and she started telling him about the problems they were having keeping the cemetery maintained. It was costing so much, she told him, and they simply couldn't raise enough money. Ronan, 61, works at St. Mary's church on Bay Avenue. He used to volunteer there one day a week. After he retired in 1995, the church took him on as a maintenance man full-time.
So there he is at the convenience store, his truck parked outside, the lawn mower in the trailer, telling Yvonne he'll look into the problem. Over the next five years he would take up a collection at St. Mary's, raising $3,500, he would put a new fence around the cemetery, he would put up a new sign, and he would replace temporary markers with engraved pavers.
He would ask for nothing in return.
"There are a hundred people buried here with no identification at all — in addition to the ones that are marked," he says. "There are about 80 names on the new sign. I didn't get all the names. I did the best I could.
"With Yvonne gone and the other trustees leaving the area, I couldn't walk away from this. That just wouldn't be right."
No, it wouldn't. So now you have something of an odd situation, a white man working to preserve the dignity of a black cemetery in a town where black folks were once prohibited from burying their dead alongside white folks. Not that Barnegat was all that different from most places in this country 50 years ago. That's just the way it was.
The black community in Barnegat was tiny. When the cemetery was established in the '20s, there were only a handful of black families in town. In 1930 there were 35 black residents, according to census figures. In 1990 there were 195, a little over 1 percent of the total population.
The black people in Barnegat either lived on Gunning River Road or they lived on Rose Hill Road. "When I was in school, in the '60s and '70s, the only other black kids were my brothers, my sisters and my cousins," says Terrianne Thomas, who was born and raised in Barnegat and now lives in Bensalem, Pa. She remembers going to Rose Hill Cemetery for the first time as a little girl, when her grandfather died. Joseph Palmer was buried there in 1970.
"That was my first funeral," she says. "It was a pretty place.
"Mrs. Keith took care of it. Her house was right next to the cemetery. She took care of it until she died."
Beatrice Keith died in 1992. Her husband, Frederick Keith, died in 1970. For years they had tended to the grave of his mother, Mrs. Philip Keith.
"The mother's grave was the only one in the cemetery with a concrete molding around it," says Eileen Thomas, Terrianne's mother.
Eileen Thomas knows all about Barnegat Hill. She too was born and raised in Barnegat, still lives there. As a little girl, she remembers hiking up to the cemetery early in the morning with her grandmother, Annie Miles. They would spend the day there, raking leaves, pulling weeds, picking up branches.
"You didn't leave until each grave was cared for," she says.
Her grandmother would make sandwiches for the kids, and at lunchtime they would sit and eat and listen to the elders talk about the people who were buried there. That's how they learned about their families. That's how history was passed down, in a peaceful place, in quiet conversation.
"Everyone on Rose Hill helped to take care of the cemetery," Thomas says.
Her grandmother died in 1953. She is buried there. Her grandfather, Harrison Miles, is buried there. Edward Simmons, her other grandfather, is buried there. He's the one who founded the Mount Zion church on Gunning River Road, in 1932. The Rev. Simmons died in a car accident in 1944.
Essie Mae Calhoun is buried there. She was Yvonne Calhoun's mother. Tyrone Palmer dug her grave. Tyrone Palmer was Terrianne Thomas' uncle. Sometimes it's hard to keep these things straight.
Tyrone Palmer was also Eleanor Palmer's brother. Their mother, Elizabeth Palmer, was buried at Barnegat Hill in 1979. Eleanor Palmer remembers the feeling of being there, the rural setting, the sound of rocking chairs creaking back and forth on wooden porches, the clatter of screen doors.
"What was around there then is gone now," she says.
Also fading fast is the history buried at Barnegat Hill Cemetery. Fifty years from now, who knows, maybe no one will remember what went on here.
As Greg Ronan might say, that just wouldn't be right."
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