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Located near the Owasco River in Auburn, along present-day Osborne Street, it was a settlement founded by free Black people in the early 19th century. There, they built homes, raised families and made a living at a time when they couldn't do the same throughout much of the rest of America. Slavery and structural racism rarely afforded them such opportunity.

By the middle of the century, however, most of those people were gone. Seemingly every trace of them followed, even the humble shacks they called home. New Guinea quietly disappeared.

Since then, interest in the settlement has also been quiet — until recently.

From to the first major film about Auburn's own Harriet Tubman, Black history has been receiving  in recent years. It was against this backdrop that the city of Auburn, in March, heard a proposal to build a parking lot on land where New Guinea once stood. One resident objected for that reason, leading the state to recommend a historic review.

Meanwhile, the Cayuga County Historian's Office is conducting its own review. After seeing the settlement's name pop up repeatedly over the last few years, research assistant Jessica Armstrong decided to dive into New Guinea in hopes that more can be known about the historic area and its people. Ruth Bradley, the county's historian, called the research "groundbreaking."

"It's never been done before, this deep a dive," Bradley told Ë®¹ûÅÉAV at her Court Street office on April 8. "(Because) a lot of historians only cared about people of privilege, 'important people,' bankers and lawyers. It's only been over the last 30 or 40 years that the history of working people, marginalized people, Black people and women has even been prioritized."

The foundation of Armstrong's research is documents like maps, deeds and census records. They confirm a few basic facts about New Guinea, she told Ë®¹ûÅÉAV. Geographically, the settlement covered both sides of Osborne Street, then called Mechanic Street, for the 1,000 feet between its blind curve at the bottom of the hill and its intersection with Elizabeth Street.

The only map bearing the settlement's name, drawn in 1837,  "New Guinea: Negro Settlement" in that spot. Nine black squares appear to represent homes there.

One of those homes once belonged to Harry and Kate Freeman. Spouses and former slaves, they are widely believed to be founders of New Guinea. The settlement likely takes its name from where they were enslaved, the  of the West African coast. They arrived in the wilderness that would become Auburn in 1793 accompanying its founder, Col. John Hardenbergh.

The first document that seems to place the Freemans in New Guinea is the 1820 census, where Harry's name is listed next to fellow Black families the Fields and Smiths, suggesting they were neighbors. They were joined in the 1830 census by Demun and Brown. It is deduced that the settlement was where the families lived together, as their addresses were not logged.

Like the date, other details of New Guinea's founding by the Freemans are uncertain. According to a 2004 research paper about the settlement by Seward House Museum intern Shawn Connery, folklore the Freemans were given their land along the Owasco River by Hardenbergh, who died in 1806. But no documentation of such a land deal has surfaced.

There is also uncertainty about the nature of the relationship between the Freemans and Hardenbergh.

Harry and Kate have traditionally been considered slaves of the Revolutionary War veteran. But a recent book, "God's Free-Man, An American Tale of Perseverance" by their descendant Ted Freeman, argues they instead were indentured servants paying off a travel debt from England. Any record of them as "slaves," he wrote, was part of a ruse with Hardenbergh for their protection.

What's more certain about Harry and Kate Freeman is their place at the center of not only New Guinea, but Auburn.

Though situated on the southeast border of the young village, the settlement and its first family were vital to the development of that village into a city in 1848. They invested in real estate, "God's Free-Man" explains, both in New Guinea and elsewhere in Auburn. Armstrong discovered mention of a "tenement house of Harry Freeman" on Garden Street in 1825.

Ted Freeman's book additionally credits his ancestors with finding work for the free Black people and escaped slaves who settled in New Guinea.

Jobs included manual labor at stone, flour and paper mills, and domestic help like gardeners and servants. As work took place on the Ontario and Genesee Turnpike, the Freemans supplied much of the payroll in local quarries. They had businesses of their own as well, like a food cart they brought to construction sites, and laundry and latrine cleaning services at hotels.

"They had really the first employment agency, I'd be bold enough to say, in the United States," Ted Freeman told Ë®¹ûÅÉAV. "Wherever the need was, you would find Harry and Kate there."

Their efforts to build a community weren't limited to employment. At New Guinea, "God's Free-Man" claims, Harry and Kate organized sentry networks to alert Black residents when slave catchers were near and intimidate them into leaving the settlement alone. The Freemans wanted to create opportunity, and they knew that meant protection as much as paying jobs.

That opportunity, Ted Freeman posits, is what first inspired Tubman to live in Auburn after escaping slavery herself and leading hundreds more to freedom via the Underground Railroad. 

"Harry had built an oasis for African Americans that provided a glimpse of freedom," he wrote. "Every day more people were coming to find safety, comfort, and, hopefully, 'Peace.'"

The Freeman name would continue to be associated with New Guinea, Auburn and the Underground Railroad through Harry and Kate's son Morgan Lewis, or Luke. A popular barber inside the American Hotel on Genesee Street, he harbored escaped slaves for almost 30 years beginning around 1834, according to an article in The Auburn Daily Advertiser after he died in April 1863.

Luke Freeman "most emphatically conquered the prejudices existing against his race," the Advertiser wrote, and so his funeral resembled those of "the most respectable white citizens." It saw multiple white clergy speak and 14 carriages proceed to the North Street Cemetery, where he was buried alongside his ancestors in a "most solemn and imposing scene of the times."

Bradley feels that scene tells another important story about New Guinea — and the demographic shift that took place as it disappeared.

"Black people were integrated into this community in ways that later on maybe they weren't," she said. "Because they were here earlier than the other waves of immigrants, they were able to establish buying property and having stable jobs. This is before the waves of the Irish and the Polish and everybody else showed up, and probably squeezed them out of where they were."

The member of the next generation of Freemans most known to history is William Freeman, grandson of Harry and Kate.

In 1846, he was found guilty of murdering four members of the Van Nest family in Fleming despite the first use of the insanity defense in a U.S. court by his attorney, William H. Seward. A beating by an Auburn Prison guard, Seward argued, inflicted a severe brain injury on his client while he was an inmate. William Freeman died of tuberculosis shortly after being sentenced to hang.

Earl Conrad's 1956 book about the case, "Mr. Seward for the Defense," contains "the most complete description" of New Guinea, Connery wrote. A mob frog-marches the captured suspect through the settlement, which Connery paraphrased as "a rugged dirt road winding its way among the trampled weeds and grass that made up the yards of about a dozen one- and two-room shacks."

That passage in the book also names Hiram and Deborah DuPuy, Adam Grey, Mary Newark and Laura Willard as some of the Black residents of New Guinea in the 1840s.

Connery added more names from that decade's census in Francis DeBoise, Catherine Johnson and William Turner. Names produced by Armstrong's census and deed research include Betsy Smith, Samuel and Rachel Kennard, Thomas Venoe, Elijah Rose, Mary Ann Counter and Joseph Wilber. Their occupations are unknown, as the census didn't record them until 1850.

"It seems like most of the settlers came closer to 1850 than 1830," Armstrong said. "It's nice to be able to put together names and, hopefully, with more research in the future, a biography."

The demographic shift from those Black names to mostly white ones took place as the decades passed and, more specifically, ownership of New Guinea's properties changed hands.

Much of the riverside was acquired in 1827 by Henry Polhemus, director of the Auburn & Owasco Canal Co., a partnership with Seward and his father-in-law, Judge Elijah Miller. Polhemus then sold the land to the company in 1835, Armstrong said. He and his partners sought to use the shallow tributary and Owasco Lake to link the new Erie Canal to the village of Moravia.

After the company failed to do that, some of its properties were acquired by Seward's son William H. Seward Jr. The properties on the other side of Mechanic Street, meanwhile, were owned by Daniel Cock. There were about a dozen on the Owasco River side, Armstrong said, and about eight on the other. In his book, Ted Freeman tallied more than 30 buildings in the settlement.

Along with the shacks Conrad described, the settlement had a mill on the residence of Peter Drinkwine and a grocery store at Mechanic and Elizabeth streets run by Isaac Woodruff, both white. Drinkwine came to Auburn from Canada in 1821. Woodruff, who came to Auburn from Connecticut in 1847, was known as "the mayor of New Guinea," according to his 1890 obituary.

Well before Woodruff died, however, the settlement had all but disappeared. White residents, looking to live closer to the new factories near the river where they worked, gradually replaced both the Black residents and their homes during the middle of the century, Connery wrote. New Guinea, he declared, "seemed to have lived and died with the Freemans."

The area's development continued with the construction of a new bridge taking Lizette Street over the Owasco River in 1874.

The people of New Guinea used a wooden plank bridge, known as "the Seward bridge," that connected to Mechanic Street at its blind curve. The new, iron bridge connected to the street further south, near Elizabeth. Around 1910, the street itself was renamed after Auburn's renowned Osborne family, and in 1954, the deteriorating iron bridge was replaced by one over Lake Street.

Nothing about the neighborhood today would suggest it was one of the first Black settlements in upstate New York.

But at least one Auburnian wants to change that.

When the city's planning board reviewed a proposal to build a parking lot at 118 Osborne St. on March 1, resident Leroy Leubner took the podium. Having lived on the street with his family for several years starting in 1974, he's long been familiar with New Guinea. If any history of the settlement remains it shouldn't be paved over, he told the board, it should be preserved.

To that end, Leubner asked the planning board to arrange a review of the property by the state Historic Preservation Office. In response, attorney Sam Giacona — representing the parking lot's developer, O'Toole's Tavern owner John "Jack" Voorhees — said the office would be contacted. The board tabled its vote on the proposal until the review is completed.

A representative of the Historic Preservation Office confirmed to Ë®¹ûÅÉAV it was contacted March 21, and recommended that Voorhees commission a Phase IA Literature Search and Sensitivity Assessment. If that finds areas of "no or minimal ground disturbance," the office would request Phase IB archaeological testing to search for any physical traces of New Guinea.

Neither Voorhees nor Giacona could be reached by Ë®¹ûÅÉAV for comment on the status of the review. The parking lot was conceived amid disputes between Voorhees and neighbors about the behavior of O'Toole's patrons, and its 24 spaces would be available to them and tenants of nearby apartments he owns. The property, now vacant, was previously a gas station.

Whatever the review finds, Leubner told Ë®¹ûÅÉAV, he would like to see the city reject Voorhees' proposal regardless.

He has asked the city to instead buy the property and build a park there as part of its plans to redevelop Osborne Street. Rep. John Katko last summer requested $4.4 million in federal funding for the project, which would include safety upgrades to the street, replaced sidewalks and new pedestrian crossings, and possibly widening of the street and improvements to its blind curve.

A city park on the vacant property would provide a "beautiful view" of the nearby mill pond, Leubner said. It could also preserve what he claims, lying inches under the overgrown surface, are the remains of the brick and limestone street that led to the second Lizette Street bridge. A historic marker at the park could tell that story — and the story of New Guinea.

"Harry and Kate Freeman were as much founders of Auburn as John Hardenbergh. They were part of the Underground Railroad before the Underground Railroad, taking care of free Black people," Leubner said. "There's so much history right here. I think, personally, it would be a very noble cause, with the park as the centerpiece. We should honor the people who actually built Auburn."