Scotch Plains church, sorority work together to build monument to historic freed slave
Published: Saturday, November 27, 2010, 9:00 PM Updated: Sunday, November 28, 2010, 7:28 AM
Enlarge The Scotch Plains Baptist Church and a Plainfield sorority are joining forces to create a replica headstone of Caesar, one of the founding members of the church, a freed slave, and Plainfield's first recorded black citizen. Caesar died in 1806 at the age of 104. He also served as a teamster during the Revolutionary War. This is the lower half of the original headstone. (David Gard/For The Star-Ledger) Historic Plainfield figure honored with replica headstone gallery (4 photos) 
SCOTCH PLAINS — In the western end of the 250-year-old cemetery at the Scotch Plains Baptist Church, the crumbling brown sandstone base of a headstone sits flanked by a small American flag.
Here lies Caesar, a freed slave, Revolutionary War veteran and one of the church’s first members.
The Rev. Chaz Hutchison keeps a pair of blue reflectors near the grave to make sure cemetery buffs and local third-graders coming to soak up colonial history can easily find it, but he won’t need the markers much longer: The church and an African-American sorority are joining forces to preserve and replace the 204-year-old headstone.
The Scotch Plains chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority is matching funds from a Union County grant to preserve the original and replace it with a marble replica at a cost of $5,600.
"I'm excited to see Caesar get the respect that was meant to be given," Hutchison said. "The last line of the biographical information (on his headstone) says 'his numerous friends have erected this stone in respect to his eminent virtue and piety.'"
Caesar was born in 1702 in what is now Guinea before being captured and sold as a slave to the farmer Isaac Drake, an early settler in Plainfield.
Caesar joined the church in the year of its founding, 1747. After being freed from slavery in 1769, he moved to Scotch Plains. Caesar drove a wagon during the Revolutionary War, carrying supplies to troops stationed at the Blue Hills Fort and Camp in Plainfield. Not only was he an early member of the church, but he was also Plainfield’s first recorded black resident, according to Plainfield Historical Society trustee Nancy Piwowar.
Historians do not know much else about him, including whether he had any children or had a last name. It was not uncommon for a slave to have the last name of his owner.
This is the lower half of the original headstone."If his story was not written on a tombstone and if we didn’t have the Drake will, we wouldn’t know Caesar’s story," said Piwowar. "It would be totally lost and forgotten in American history."
Caesar died in 1806 at age 104. His grave marker, made from sandstone, stood taller at about 3 feet than that of his former master. But years of exposure to wind and weather took their toll, and the headstone broke off its base sometime in the past few decades.
The sandstone slab was laid against the side of the church and gradually people forgot where Caesar’s grave was. A little more than a decade ago, Hutchison, then a church employee, noticed the inscription on the bottom of the broken base of an anonymous tombstone matched the wording on the sandstone slab now kept in Hutchison’s office.
Still, there was little the church could do to improve the site.
"We really didn’t have several thousand dollars sitting around to make a stone," he said.
The ball started rolling in 2001 when students from Plainfield’s Maxson Middle School, working with Piwowar, conducted a critical-thinking exercise about what to do with the headstone. The sorority got involved a few years later when a member who was also a parishioner got Hutchison to tell them Caesar’s story.
They plan to unveil the stone in February to coincide with Black History Month.
"I think it’s something that everyone should be aware of and learn more about, because this is part of our history," said sorority member and Scotch Plains resident Jacquie Rhodes. "It’s not just black history."
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