Hampstead Cemetery

Front inscription

A cemetery established here in 1841, also known as “God’s Acre” and later “the German Cemetery,” was maintained by St. Matthews Evangelical Lutheran Church until about 1860. That church, founded in 1840 by the rapidly-growing community of Germans in Charleston, was originally the German Evangelical Church of Charleston. Its founders purchased land here for a cemetery shortly before they built their church at the corner of Anson and Hasell Streets.

Reverse inscription

Hampstead Cemetery, laid out between cemeteries owned by the African Society and the Hebrew Congregation, sold half-plots and quarter-plots to church members and others. Yellow fever epidemics in 1849, 1852, and 1856 killed so many Germans that the cemetery was almost full by 1857, when the church dedicated Bethany Cemetery, a new cemetery in North Charleston, near Magnolia Cemetery. Several graves found herre in 1982 were removed to Bethany in 2009.