Mount Moriah Cemetery

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Timbuctoo residents were prominent in the congregation of Mount Moriah African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in its early years.  As noted above, the congregation purchased its first land parcel in March of 1826.  The first recorded land sales to Black people in the village that would come to be known as Timbuctoo were recorded six months later in September of that year.  Trustee Wardell Parker was among the first buyers.  Robert Evans and Perry Gibson appear in later records.  It is not known whether these men and other Black people lived in Timbuctoo before buying land.

Mount Moriah Cemetery is among the oldest Black cemeteries in Burlington County and is by far the largest, containing approximately 525 graves.  The first cemetery lot was located behind the church’s first sanctuary near the corner of president day Marne Highway and the Mount Holly Bypass. This smaller cemetery is pictured above.  In  the 1880s, interments began in a second cemetery lot on the east side of the Mount Holly Bypass. The two parcels were purchased separately, decades apart,  and were never connected. See illustration below. 

The congregation relocated to a new sanctuary at 212 Washington St. in 1862.