There is another Marble Cemetery which historians sometimes confuse with this hidden graveyard, namely, one on Second Street, between First and Second Avenues. Some of the larger merchants of the city bought the ground in 1832, and created the New York City Marble Cemetery. Among the original owners was Robert Lenox. When he died, in 1839, his body was placed in a vault of the First Presbyterian Church at 16 Wall Street. When that church was removed to Fifth Avenue and Twelfth Street the remains of Lenox with others were removed to this Marble Cemetery. The body of President James Monroe was first interred here, but was removed in 1859 to Virginia. Thomas Addis Emmet, the famous jurist, is also buried here. One of the most conspicuous monuments in St. Paul's churchyard, the shaft at the right of the church, was erected to the memory of Emmet. A large column on the other side of the church preserves the memory of another man whose body does not lie in the churchyard, for William James Macneven was interred in the burying-ground of the Riker family at Bowery Bay, L. I.
In Second Street, between Avenue A and First Avenue, stood a Methodist church, and beside it a graveyard, until 1840; when the building was turned into a public school. There were fifteen hundred bodies in the yard, but they were not removed to Evergreen Cemetery until 1860. Only fifteen bodies were claimed by relatives. One man who applied for his father's body refused that offered him, claiming that the skull was too small, and that some mistake had been made in disinterment.
Second Street Methodist Episcopal Church, between Avenues C and D, was built in 1832, the congregation having previously worshipped in private houses in the vicinity. At one time this was the most prominent and wealthiest church on the eastern side of the city.
Bouwerie Village
The Bouwerie Village was another of the little settlements—once a busy spot, but now so effaced that every outline of its existence is blotted out. It centred about the site of the present St. Mark's Church, Second Avenue and Tenth Street. In 1651, when Peter Stuyvesant, the last of the Dutch Governors, had ruled four years, he purchased the Great Bouwerie, a tract of land extending two miles along the river north of what is now Grand Street, taking in a section of the present Bowery and Third Avenue. As there was, from time to time, trouble with the Indians, the Governor ordered the dwellers on his bouwerie, as well as those on adjoining bouweries, to form a village and gather there for mutual protection at the first sign of an outbreak. Very soon the settlement included a blacksmith's shop, a tavern and a dozen houses. In this way the Bouwerie Village was started. Peter Stuyvesant in time built a chapel, and in it Hermanus Van Hoboken, the schoolmaster, after whom the city of Hoboken is named, preached. Years after the founding of the village, when New Amsterdam had become New York, and when the old Governor had returned from Holland, where he had, before the States-General, fought for vindication in so readily giving up the province to the English, Stuyvesant returned to end his days in the Bouwerie Village. He died there at the age of eighty, and was buried in the graveyard of the Bouwerie Church. St. Mark's Church, at Tenth Street and Second Avenue, stands on the site of the old church, and a memorial stone to Peter Stuyvesant is still to be seen under the porch. It reads:
Grave of Peter Stuyvesant