Albany County Almshouse Cemetery
[Section 48, Lot 1]
Those who are buried in the Albany County Almshouse from 1896-1926
Dutch colonists created the almshouse or poor house from a 1562 decree by Director-General Pieter Stuyvesant. Sometimes known as a “deacon house,” these were a repository for people with disabilities, the homeless, or aged persons wherein neighbors could assist in caring for them. The first location would be near present-day Beaver Street and Broadway. The Dutch Reformed Church would establish a second one in 1684 on Norton Street.
In 1788, the same year New York became a state, the legislature passed a law which established the Albany County Almshouse “to furnish the poor of the city and surrounding towns.” There would be some locations within the city of Albany, most notably a 216-acre property a couple of miles from the state Capitol. In 1815, this property would encompass numerous structures, a 116-acre farm and a pauper lot.
Throughout the next 111 years, there would be additions and adjustments to the almshouse due in part to social reformers. It would lead the way to changes in state laws which established specified facilities, such as hospitals, mental intuitions, and orphanages. In 1926, a new county almshouse would be constructed outside the city limits within the town of Colonie, a former Shaker site near the Albany International Airport.
The pauper lot would remain in its location off New Scotland Avenue while the rest of the site would evolve. This pauper location would be the burial site from within the almshouse but also be a burial site for prisoners, immigrants with no family, homeless, and “unidentified corpses found in the Hudson River.” Those buried would be done some in coffins five to six deep, or in mass graves. It was not until 2002 when the site would be the location for the David Axelrod Institute of Public Health that the remains of those buried would find their way to Albany Rural Cemetery.
As this was one of the oldest almshouse burial sites, archeologists from the New York State Museum worked with the developers to exhume the bodies. Garments were still intact, and a few rings, rosaries, and rings. In total, 1125 bodies were exhumed with 986 identified as “male, female or juvenile.” Nine skulls were “intact enough to sculpt a 3-D facial reconstruction.” Osteologists, those who study skeleton and bone structures were brought in to help reconstruct some of those skulls which are on display at the New York State Museum.
Each body was reinterred in individual caskets and not lay together again. A granite monument marks their mass burial with the inscription “Here lie those once buried in the Albany County Almshouse Cemetery transferred to this site 2002 A.D.” Additionally, a passage from Walt Whitman’s The Last Invocation is also “Let me glide noiselessly forth; With the key of softness unlock the locks with a whisper, Set open the doors o soul.”