Historians Find Wilton’s Lost Colonial-era Spruce Bank Cemetery for Enslaved and Free Black Wiltonians

The search for a 275-year-old forgotten final resting ground for enslaved and free Black Wiltonians has borne fruit: officials at the Wilton Historical Society announced Wednesday, Feb. 21, that the location of the historic Spruce Bank Cemetery, discovered through extensive research, was confirmed after a ground penetrating radar survey revealed eight burials on a portion of 331 Danbury Rd. where historians had believed the cemetery to be.

The site sits sandwiched tightly between Rte. 7 on the east and the Norwalk River and MetroNorth’s Danbury Branch railroad line to the west. Until recently, the triangle-shaped property was the location for a modern-day limousine business, Regency Limousine, now sold to a New Canaan company. The property’s current owner Steve Summerton and Regency Properties, LLC, had been in negotiations to sell the land to developers who had submitted pre-applications plans for a 126-unit apartment building. 

Historical society officials called locating Spruce Bank Cemetery, which dates back the Colonia era, “a significant finding that documents a key piece of the town’s history and pinpoints the resting places of some of Wilton’s most marginalized residents.”

“Over the past five years, the Wilton Historical Society has been quite focused on bringing to light the history of enslaved and free black people in Wilton. The Spruce Bank Cemetery location was tantalizingly elusive — and we became fixated on finding it.” WHS Executive Director Nick Foster said.

Found at the northern end of the Danbury Rd. lot, the original quarter-acre reserved for the cemetery was first encroached on by the arrival of the railroad in 1852, and then the expansion and rerouting of old Danbury Rd., now Route 7. The last documented burial at Spruce Bank was in the late 1870s. Sometime afterwards the fieldstone markers were vandalized and removed. Without visible evidence at the ground surface level — and despite historians searching for it in the 1890s, 1940s, and 1990s — memory of the exact location was lost.

Dr. Julie Hughes, the historian that Wilton Historical Society had hired to conduct research into enslaved people in Wilton, ‘rediscovered’ the cemetery through in-depth deed and mapping research.

According to Hughes — now the archivist at the Wilton Library‘s Wilton History Room and a WHS Trustee — Spruce Bank Cemetery pre-dates 1749, when the Proprietors of Norwalk deeded a part of the commons to Daniel Belden for a mill site, while reserving the sanctity of the African American burial ground included in the parcel.

“[When that research] led us to the most likely spot, we were able to obtain a grant from the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) for a non-invasive Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) survey to see if any unmarked burials were present and identifiable,” Foster said.

State legislation outlines measures that need to be taken to protect historic burial grounds from disturbance and preserve them. In fact, state law makes intentionally destroying or removing graves or gravestones, or disturbing cemeteries or burial grounds a felony [CT Gen. Stat § 53a-218 (2012)].

The SHPO alerted Wilton’s Planning and Zoning Department, and officials there “ordered any planned development on the site to cease until proper forensics were conducted and a clearer understanding of the matter was obtained,” according to Hughes, who said that gave researchers “time to prove the cemetery was real.”

Foster said archaeologist Dr. David Leslie of TerraSearch Geophysical conducted the testing and determined there were eight burials.

Now that research has confirmed the cemetery’s location, officials will now look toward preserving and memorializing those buried there, Foster said.

“Now we can properly commemorate the people buried here who gave so much to Wilton and got so little in return,” Hughes said. “We all feel such a deep sense of responsibility and so much joy that they are finally safe and will remain protected under Connecticut State law.”

According to materials presented by the Wilton Historical Society, the Spruce Bank Cemetery portion of the property will be protected from development “to respect the dignity of those reposing in the sacred ground.”

The discovery and confirmation doesn’t mean that the larger property at 331 Danbury Rd. can’t still be sold and developed.

“Luckily, the burials are at the extreme northern end of the property on a section of land which already has an easement on it due to power lines,” Foster told GMW.

Any developer interested would still need to submit a standard pre-application, and any proposal would be subject to all the normal zoning stipulations — but in addition they would have to ensure the burial ground was not impacted in any way. According to Foster, that means no permits would be approved to develop anything on that small section of the three-acre plot but it does leave the vast majority of the land still available.

In the meantime, the Society will be working with a group of representatives from the local Black and African American community to discuss ideas around a more definitive marker for the location, and outline a term education program.