TCNJ

28 The College of New Jersey Magazine major, spent time at the site last year as part of ecology professor Janet Morrison's Plants and People class. "It's not every day you hear you're going to be working in a former grave- yard doing ecological work," he says. Patel dodged poison ivy as he and other students scrambled through overgrown thickets between the creek and cemetery to collect specimens for a vegetation survey that will help iden- tify native plants to include in future gardens; by the end of the day, he real- ized the impact would go beyond their report, increasing the community's understanding of local ecology. "Being a student, you sometimes become conditioned to only see what you're learning through the scope of the very narrow confines of your subject," he says. "But to actually see it in action and see the intersections it has with various facets of everyday real life is eye-opening." Ceramic and glass artifacts strewn across the surface of the site — dis- " [Algernon has] brought a lot of people to bear in helping out, but it's happening only because he has been in the background, nagging and herding people into pushing this project forward." — Trenton Historical Society President Damon Tvaryanas covered by students from George Leader's archaeology course and TCNJ's Anthropology Society — provided key evidence for Ward's chronicle of the cemetery's timeline; Heinz ketchup bottles, dating to around 1910 to 1920, pinpointed the period when the neglect of the area accelerated. Trenton Historical Society President Damon Tvaryanas praised the widespread community participa- tion in the project but said that without Ward's leadership, the long- overdue restoration would likely not be underway. "Algie has been the person single- handedly behind this," Tvaryanas says. "He's brought a lot of people to bear in helping out, but it's happening only because he has been in the back- ground, nagging and herding people into pushing this project forward. This is his baby, and he's done a great job in promoting it." Ward's reclamation efforts are rooted in a fierce love of his home- town, where he grew up exploring the waterways and woods of the neighborhood. "I was always down at the creeks catching frogs and crayfish and minnows," he says. "It became a kind of passion." In high school, music temporarily replaced nature at the center of his life, as Ward became the trumpeter in a popular local band called The Meditators. He skipped math class to jam in the band room, believing his future lay onstage until a broken jaw forced a different path. He enrolled at Trenton State College and chose biology as his major. It wasn't until Ward was well into his career as a research scientist for the New Jersey Department of Health that he finally turned his attention to history; throughout his education, he'd found the subject dry, filled with too many dates and not enough stories in which he could recognize himself. But that changed when a friend invited him to the Civil War and Native American Museum in Hamilton, New Jersey, and he spotted photographs of Black soldiers. "I was like, 'Wait — there were Black soldiers in the Civil War?'" Ward says. "'What?!' I was fascinated." He began reading about these Union soldiers, many of whom came from the South Jersey area, and soon attended his first reenactment in Neshaminy,

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