SCHOOL PROGRAMS FOCUS FIGURES

Green-Wood’s American history and art history school programs teach curriculum-based content and historical thinking skills by having students investigate the lives and monuments of people interred here. Check out some of the figures your students may learn about on their visit here. Note that many figures can be featured in multiple programs:

AMERICAN REVOLUTION:

  • John Greenwood: patriot fifeboy in the Continental Army and George Washington’s favorite dentist
  • Margaret Pine: once thought to be the last enslaved person in New York State, born in 1776
  • Ebenezer Stevens: patriot, soldier, and participant in the Boston Tea Party

CIVIL WAR:

  • Civil War Soldiers’ Monument: an 1869 memorial to the 149,000 Union soldiers from New York City
  • Anna Leah Fox: one of the infamous Fox sisters, who inspired the Spiritualist movement that both comforted and confounded bereft family members of fallen soldiers in the Civil War era and beyond
  • Abigail Hopper Gibbons: noted abolitionist, Underground Railroad station master and Civil War nurse
  • Laura Keene: star of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater, present the night of Lincoln’s assassination
  • The Little Drummer Boy, Clarence MacKenzie: Brooklyn’s first casualty of the war, who died in training from friendly fire at age twelve
  • The Soldiers’ Lot: land Green-Wood donated for free burials of New York State soldiers who died during the Civil War, full of Union veterans’ graves
  • Samuel H. Sims: soldier in Burnside’s 9th brigade. Green-Wood’s Collections contain many of his personal papers.
  • Marianne (Mary) F. Stranahan: president of the Women’s Relief Association of Brooklyn and Long Island and Civil War nurse
  • John Munroe: soldier, quartermaster of the 35th infantry, United States Colored Troops

IMMIGRANT Pioneers

  • Chow Ye Tong lot: graves of people associated with a Chinese-American organization active during the period of Chinese exclusion
  • The Sahadi family: Lebanese (formerly referred to as Upper Syrian) immigrants of Manhattan’s “Little Syria” in the 1890s who later created a food empire on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn
  • Anna Ottendorfer: philanthropist and owner of the Staats Zeitung, an important German language newspaper in the nineteenth century

INNOVATORS & INVENTORS

  • Mary Putnam Jacobi: pioneering pediatrician and suffragist
  • Henry Bergh: Founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
  • Sarah Jane Smith Tompkins Garnet: first Black public school principal in NYC, suffragist, organizer
  • Clemence Lozier: physician, suffragist, and trailblazer in the training of women doctors
  • Henry Chadwick: known as the “Father of Baseball,” originated modern baseball terminology

BLACK NEW YORKERS WHO CHANGED AMERICA

  • Jean-Michel Basquiat: musician, poet and groundbreaking Neo-Expressionist and graffiti artist of the late twentieth century
  • Samuel Cornish: pioneering abolitionist and journalist, co-publisher of the first Black newspaper in the U.S.
  • Elizabeth Gloucester: Abolitionist and real estate tycoon who left an estate valued over one million dollars to her children after her death
  • James Weldon Johnson: NAACP officer, diplomat, poet, and lyricist of the Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing, known as the “Black National Anthem”
  • Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Steward: first Black, female doctor in New York State, third in the country; abolitionist, activist, and community leader

LGBTQ+ PIONEERS

  • Emma Stebbins: sculptor of “The Angel of the Waters” atop Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, first woman artist to create a public artwork for the city. Life partner to famous actress, Charlotte Cushman
  • Violet Oakley: pioneering American artist who advocated for equal rights for all races and sexes, and worked for world peace
  • Dr. Richard Isay: psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and gay-rights advocate
  • Leonard Bernstein: composer, conductor, pianist and music educator, who served as music director for the New York Philharmonic and composed the hit musical “West Side Story”
  • Frances Kellor: American social reformer dedicated to women’s rights and immigration issues
  • Mary Dreier: American social reformer dedicated to securing rights for working women