A centuries-old Black burial ground in Northeast Philadelphia was nearly forgotten. Preservationists want to honor those buried there.

The Byberry Township African American Burial Ground has no tombstones, grave markers, or signs of any kind. Title searchers have been unable to locate a deed to the property.

But Deborah Gary knows where the tiny cemetery was and still is.

“It’s disturbing to know it’s here,” she said, pausing at a weedy tangle of woods between Benjamin Rush State Park and the back of a National Archives facility in Northeast Philadelphia.

“After I saw it for the first time in April of last year, I let our group know this is something we should take on and try to fix,” she said.

A Realtor who lives in Northwest Philly, Gary is the cofounder of the Society to Preserve Philadelphia African American Assets. The nonprofit is working with the Byberry Friends Meeting and the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia, as well as with members of the Friends of Northeast Philadelphia History and the Northeast Philadelphia History Network to clean up, improve, and interpret the site.

Although local media have run occasionally stories about the cemetery, the preservation of sites of significance to Black history has taken on more urgency in recent years. Private citizens have led efforts to save the Philadelphia homes of jazz giant John Coltrane and esteemed painter Henry Ossawa Tanner, as well as a Camden rowhouse associated with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that was heavily damaged in a recent fire.

“It’s amazing that something this significant has been missing from general knowledge all this time,” society board member Ferdinand Morrison said during a visit to the Byberry cemetery earlier this month. “It’s really exciting to be able to start on this project.”

Said historian Hannah Wallace: “This is hallowed ground.”

The graveyard was established by the Friends Meeting in 1780 as “The Burying Place For All Free Negroes or People of Color within Byberry.”

The ground “was consecrated ... to remain a final resting place for free and formerly enslaved Africans,” Wallace wrote in a summary of her research on the site.

She did the work on behalf of the society and the alliance; the project was underwritten by a grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Settled in 1682 by Quakers, Byberry Township was incorporated into the City of Philadelphia in 1854. Burials had long ceased by the time the meeting sold the cemetery to the city for $3,000 in 1980.

“The city didn’t do anything to honor the site after the sale,” said Jack McCarthy, board president of the Friends of Northeast Philadelphia History.

Mary Ellen McNish, president of the meeting’s board of trustees, was neither involved with or aware of the sale at the time. But she has since seen a handwritten reference to it in a ledger book and said the city ”never recorded” the deed.

In an email, a city spokesperson said that despite “previous, painstaking city efforts to locate definitive evidence of ownership, a 1980 deed has never been found.”

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A 1993 report by a consultant to the General Services Administration for the planned construction of the National Archives building cited the need to protect the cemetery — and observed that about half of the ground in it had been under cultivation along with the adjacent farmland.

The report also identified the owner of the burial ground in 1993 as the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp. (PIDC).

A PIDC spokesperson declined to comment. But a title search conducted last year for the alliance failed to turn up a deed and concluded that the Byberry Meeting still owns the cemetery.

“We’re all trying to figure this out, and we all have the same purpose: To save this important and historic piece of property,” McNish said. “We’re all coming from a place of good intentions, and we will work it out.”

Said Wallace: “I’m never surprised when something turns up out of nowhere. Could the deed turn up? That would be helpful.”

The cemetery comprises about 300 square feet of ground, and the only record of a burial there is that of a formerly enslaved Black man named Jim.

But Joseph J. Menkevich, who prepared the 85-page nomination that got the cemetery included in the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places in 2015, said he believes ground-penetrating radar will find evidence of a good number of other burials on the site. It was not uncommon in the 18th and 19th centuries for bodies to be interred above other bodies, he said.

Menkevich also welcomed the society’s role in the effort on behalf of the burial ground.

“Black lives do matter, even [those of] people who have been dead for 200 years,” he said. ”What needs to happen at the cemetery is to get the thing surveyed, delineate the boundary, put a wrought-iron fence around it, and make it accessible to the public.”

Alliance executive director Paul Steinke called the cemetery “very important in understanding the history of free African Americans” in the Colonial era.

“This is the first case in my experience where there’s unclear ownership of a burial ground,” he said. “We often deal with tangled titles in the city. But usually that’s for houses. Not cemeteries.

“And we also need to sort out who’s buried there, and how to honor them,” said Steinke.

» READ MORE: North Philadelphia rowhouse where Henry Ossawa Tanner and his family made history is at risk of demolition. How did it end up like this?

Gary is looking forward to having volunteers participate in the statewide cleanup of Black cemeteries sponsored by the Pennsylvania Hallowed Grounds organization on April 22, which is Earth Day.

She is realistic — but resolute — about the Byberry burial ground’s future.

“I’m not expecting anything immediately, other than opportunities for education and awareness,” she said. “I know this is long term. It’s going to be years to get it to something better. But after the cleanup, it won’t look like this.”