Just a few years ago, two dozen Black war veterans’ graves were hidden behind decades of weeds and trash in the Town of Rye until community members came together to clean the cemetery up.

Now a local New York organization is heading efforts to fully restore the town’s only African-American cemetery and turn it into a site honoring the history of the people buried there.

Building Community Bridges wants to preserve the graves of the 22 black war veterans who saw combat in the Civil War, Spanish-American War and World War I and II, along with almost one hundred other African-American graves in the cemetery. The organization will research the history of the people buried there and install kiosks that provide that information to visitors.

Pictured: The gravestone of Robert Purdy (1820-1890), an escaped slave from Louisiana who served during the Civil War and is now buried in the African-American cemetery in the Town of Rye.