About: Payne's Cemetery

Payne's Cemetery was a 13-acre (53,000 m2) cemetery located in the Benning Ridge neighborhood of Washington, D.C., in the United States. It was founded in 1851 as a privately owned secular cemetery open to the public, but it primarily served the city's African American community. The cemetery was declared abandoned by the city in 1966. About 2,000 bodies at Payne's Cemetery were reinterred at National Harmony Memorial Park cemetery in Prince George's County, Maryland. Two public schools and a recreation center were constructed atop the cemetery in the late 1960s, during which time hundreds of corpses were unearthed and summarily disposed of.