Traces Remain: A Case Study in Memory and Forgetting from Christ the King, Willingboro

Traces of memory remain in and on the land but often require skilled interpreters. Interpreting archives, land, and buildings together allows for memorial interpreters to piece more robust memories together from the traces that remain on the land from its uses. This paper examines a case study from the construction of a Levittown in New Jersey in the late 1950s to elucidate these two claims. I use archival evidence of the Levitt Corporation’s land donation to the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey and of the diocese’s subsequent forced liquidation of a Black parish to fund the construction of a new White parish in the Levittown to sketch the contours of the imagined future of the Episcopal Church in New Jersey at that time. Careful interpretation made it possible to reconstruct the memory of racially exclusive fantasies despite attempts to relegate these memories in archival oblivion.