[DISCLAIMER: I am not revealing the location of the following investigation, nor have I named any companies or organizations associated with the property. This is to allow adequate time for research in order for independent groups to look into best practices for preservation.]
How do you save a cemetery you can’t find? It was brought to my attention that an old local family’s homestead was in jeopardy of industrial development and that there might have been a slave cemetery on the property in addition to an antebellum brick house. Of course, my interest peaked.
The history of the family and the house is easy enough to trace. Several hours of research in property and family history records revealed to me that the house was built somewhere between 1813-1820 by a veteran of the Revolutionary War. The war vet died in 1820, so he did not enjoy the house long. His family had been in the area since the 1760s and the property remained in the hands of direct descendants until the 1930s. The house experienced a fire which started in the attic in 1913 and it gutted much of the interior of the house. The granddaughter of the man who founded the homestead, an old woman in 1913, oversaw the renovations and continued to maintain the house as an entertaining venue for family occasions and summer vacations until her death in 1923. Her son inherited the property, but because of his misfortune following the Great Depression the property was placed into foreclosure in 1936. The house traded owners over the intervening decades, but was always cared for, even if basically. Although the interior transformed over the years to accommodate electricity and modern amenities, the stone foundation and 18-inch thick brick walls are original to the structure, making it a marvel of construction.
The house was built by enslaved artisans and craftsmen whose reputation was so renowned that the family leant their workers out to other families for additional local building projects. The family owned a large number of enslaved people throughout the two generations that led up to the Civil War. In the 1860 census, the family had nearly 40 slaves which was a huge amount for this area. In a 1980 description of a “slave cemetery still visible” on the property, the mention comes amid discussion of the house and the property. This leads me to believe that the cemetery is in the immediate vicinity of the main house. A local descendant of another founding family claims that this family shared a cemetery with another slave-owning family close by. I know that this was a common practice in many places, and I’ve even come across this example in the same county, but in this instance, I’m not convinced. Where the shared cemetery would be would have been a mile away with an interstate running between. I doubt that following a description of the family property and house a phrase such as “the slave cemetery is still visible” would refer to a burying ground so far away. I’m believing it to mean that the cemetery was on that immediate property.
The property is currently owned by an industrial development company who has plans to erect several warehouses totaling over 5 million square feet of concrete and loading docks. The company hired a very reputable cultural resource protection service, one of the best in the southern United States. The final report from the researchers recommended the house be considered eligible for placement on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP), but the state turned down the recommendation, saying vaguely that they disagreed but without citing any reasons. The cultural protection company also stated that they searched “a very large area around the house and of the surrounding terrain” but that they did not find evidence of a cemetery. The problem with this conclusion is that the house (and possibly cemetery) sits on an almost 300-acre tract of land, half of which is covered with overgrown woods. Without knowing their specific techniques and/or tools with which they searched, I would say that it would be rather difficult to find an antebellum burial ground amid such elements.
As you can tell, there are now two problems facing this property. One is that the state decided against recommending the house for national protection through the NRHP. That puts the house in jeopardy of being destroyed. The second is that the cemetery has not yet been located and if it is in fact on the property, might be lost for good. The local chapter of the Daughters of the Revolution (DAR) are being involved in discussions to help save the house and question the rejection of the eligibility for NRHP listing. The local NAACP chapter has been notified in regards to the search for the slave cemetery. Old cemeteries in general are hard to find and save, but unmarked African American slave cemeteries are at the top of the endangered list and are therefore a priority of historians and archeologists to help preserve.
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