A Civil War sentry still guards Whitesboro
Noah Cherry, eternal guardian of his adopted town
For my final Black History Month tribute to the New Jersey village founded by George White in 1903, I turn to a well-tended grave along the Garden State Parkway and its nearly forgotten occupant.
Final resting place of Whitesboro’s gallant adopted son, Noah Cherry.
My forthcoming book (tentatively titled Searching for Freedom) on the history of Whitesboro, founded in 1903, relates the obscure tale of its arguably most puzzling historical monument, one raised to an elderly veteran of the Civil War, Noah Cherry:
Unlikely symbol of a small, close-knit community, transplanted almost intact from the swamplands of eastern North Carolina at the turn of the twentieth century …
Cherry has remained a figure of near-mythological status for Whitesboro. How
Cherry himself came to live there—recruited by friends and relatives lured here by
the promise of cheap land and a life free from racial oppression—is an integral
part of the small town’s proud story.
Cherry died in Whitesboro in 1907, just three years after his arrival, and only weeks after registering for a increase in his monthly pension for military service. He was duly mourned by the residents of the tiny village, before being buried in a family graveyard near the home of another early resident, his kinsman. But nearly 50 years later, when almost all other graves were being relocated to a more modern town graveyard north of Whitesboro, in preparation for the construction of the new Garden State Parkway, those holding the remains of Noah Cherry and a handful of others stubbornly refused to join the exodus.
In death as well as life, Cherry was nothing if not resilient. In my words,
How the former slave turned soldier became a modern sentry along the busy
Parkway is a complicated tale: a parable, of sorts, for the journey of all African
Americans toward freedom and security, and one buried for decades in dusty
military pension files at the National Archives.
Noah Cherry had been among the oldest new settlers to make the long journey from North Carolina to New Jersey. Possibly a distant relative of George White’s third wife, Cora Lena Cherry White, Private Cherry served in the Union Army from 1863 to 1865. The Bertie County, N.C., native was among dozens of freed slaves recruited for the 2nd N.C. Infantry Regiment—later renamed the 36th Infantry Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops—by Union forces, which then occupied much of northeastern North Carolina.
Enlistment and pension file records in the National Archives detail his enlistment, at age 42, on July 13, 1863. According to his regimental battle records, Cherry and others in the 36th saw little action but did stand guard for a time at a so-called “contraband” camp—for escaped slaves—near Leonardstown, Maryland. Just after War’s end in 1865, Cherry’s regiment was transferred to Texas, for service along the Rio Grande, after serving at Dutch Cap, Virginia.
But plagued by the after-effects of a mysterious injury at Dutch Gap which damaged his kidneys, Cherry was discharged for disability (Bright’s disease) in November 1865, returning home to Bertie County, where he recovered well enough to farm. In 1888, he began receiving a small Civil War pension, and in 1904, moved north to Whitesboro after a three-year transition in Elizabeth City, N.C. In his final home, he apparently lived briefly with the family of kinsman General Scott Askew, in whose family graveyard he was later interred.
The New Jersey Press of Atlantic City later quoted a manuscript written by Cherry’s great grand-niece, Mrs. Wiley Jane [Askew] Williams, which described her long-dead relative, whom she had met as a young woman:
Like us, he came from North Carolina, a most industrious, hardworking man. He built a small frame house on Main Street in Whitesboro and sent for his family,
who were then living in Norfolk, Virginia. He was a great help to my father,
especially at hog-killing time. … I used to love to hear uncle Noah singing at prayer
meeting, which was held at our house at 5 AM o’clock each Sunday morning. …
In my mind I can still hear him singing, in his deep but clear baritone voice, his
favorite hymn by Isaac Watts.
Mrs. Williams had other tales of her larger-than-life uncle, the likelier of which revolved around his temporarily catatonic state—induced by inhaling turpentine accidentally after rushing in from a rainstorm—and the more apocryphal describing a spectral image, pounding during a terrible storm by night on his door, loudly predicting imminent death for a visiting neighbor, Lazarus Laws. Laws died that night, she said, and Cherry, the unfortunate witness, died shortly afterward.
Whether real or imagined, the nightmare may have prompted him to set his affairs in order, by applying for a just-approved pension increase. Just before his actual death in 1907, he applied for the increase, claiming then to be 76 years old. “I was born in slavery, and I have but slight knowledge of my age, or the circumstances surrounding my birth,” Cherry told a Cape May County justice of the peace, “but as near as I can say I was born on the eighth day of August 1830.”
As he had once told Army officials in 1863, however, he was perhaps a decade older, closer to 85 or 86 years old, if born around 1821. Whatever his true age, he did not live to draw the higher check, expiring weeks later. His death drew little notice outside Whitesboro, with no obituary in county newspapers—perhaps due to a simple oversight by the family, not racism. (At least one other black Civil War veteran, who died months earlier, had been memorialized on the front page of the Cape May Herald: Cornelius Trusty, “a colored veteran of the Civil War and a highly respected citizen.”)
His widow moved away. As the rest of Cherry’s immediate family began to die out, his house burned down; few townspeople would thereafter have come to visit his grave, and by the mid-1950s, almost no one alive knew his story. Then Cherry’s barely lingering legacy came unexpectedly to the attention of public officials, according to a 1989 notation on the reverse of Cherry’s county grave registration record, as documented by local historian Alice Jones Roberson in her 2002 book (Whitesboro, New Jersey: Pioneers, Early Settlers, New Town).
During the construction of the terminal segment of the New Jersey Garden State Parkway, the enormous project initially mandated removal of the entire Whitesboro graveyard on its eastern right-of-way. But then someone with stubborn influence well beyond Cape May County became involved—there is no conclusive evidence as to the savior’s identity, beyond a cryptic 30-year-old reference to “Mr. Volpe”—and Parkway officials were forced to leave seven graves behind on the Parkway’s southbound shoulder. (One theory is that it could have referred to future Massachusetts Governor and U.S. Transportation Secretary John A. Volpe, who served briefly as U.S. Federal Highway Commissioner in the 1950s.)
Whoever gets the credit, Noah Cherry and his comrades were seemingly saved from otherwise-relentless progress. But the respite held at least one historical twist. Just two decades later, all but Cherry’s headstone had disappeared from the site, or simply disintegrated. It was only then that intervention by yet another interested citizen saved his grave from final oblivion, according to another newspaper account in the Press of Atlantic City:
U.S. Coast Guard chaplain, Reverend Paul Armstrong, of nearby Ocean City, first
noticed it in the late 1970s, while commuting along the Parkway from Fort Dix to
Cape May for his job, and soon became Cherry’s unofficial caretaker. Rev.
Armstrong worked with parkway officials to stabilize the headstone on a new
platform, and for years placed fresh flowers and new flags at the site on Memorial
Day and Veterans Day, believing it the least he could do to honor Cherry’s memory.
Periodically, tributes to Cherry continue to appear in local newspapers and other sources, keeping the legend alive. If Noah Cherry’s brief sojourn in Whitesboro left no other permanent trace of his storied life, beyond his possible link to the town’s Cherry Street, the refurbished gravestone was destined to become far more than a burial site.
As I note in closing that chapter of my book, the gravestone
… was a fitting tribute to a stalwart soul. Today, Private Noah Cherry’s ghost
guards the town’s entrance and legacy. A century and a half after his discharge
from the Union Army, Cherry has entered a new form of permanent reserve duty, as a lone sentry in the home guard of his final resting place.
Next time: His birth county remembers civil rights pioneer George White