Rossville Cemetery/Blazing Star Burial Ground
Posted by: 
chstress53
N 40° 33.377 W 074° 12.759
18T E 566659 N 4489799
This stretch of Arthur Kill Road is lined with auto body shops, roadside taverns, the odd jail or two. But just off to the side of the road, west of the West Shore Expressway, you come upon this abandoned graveyard.
Waymark Code: WM61G
Location: New York, United States
Date Posted: 01/14/2006
Views: 118
The Blazing Star Burial Ground, otherwise known by its more prosaic name, Rossville Cemetery, is on twisting, curving Arthur Kill Road just east of Rossville Avenue.
Rossville, though now bisected by the West Shore Expressway and some truly ugly tract housing, has an important past as a ferry crossing for stagecoach routes between NYC and Philadelphia, the Blazing Star Ferry. Travis, another Staten Island community to the notrtheast, was another such ferry crossing; the New Blazing Star Inn was a way station for weary travelers located at what is now the foot of Victory Boulevard, where the New Blazing Star Ferry was the crossing to New Jersey. You can find the Sleight family along with though many other prominent Staten Island names, like the Seguines and the Deckers. Israel Oakley, was interred here in 1824.
But this is not only a cemetery for people. While you wander among the graves of Blazing Star, which date from 1750 to 1840, take a look out through the trees toward the Arthur Kill, the waterway separating Staten Island from New Jersey and you find a reliquary of dead ships. They don't hold a candle, bowsprit or jibmast to the harbor of Rossville. This is certainly the dead zone.
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