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Mid-twentieth-century trends toward increased housing development and consequent rising land prices and tax rates forced many African American families to sell their land and attendant gravesites. Difficult economic times also forced families to migrate to northern cities to seek employment. In their absence, many of their historic house sites and cemeteries were destroyed. In other cases, carvedfieldstonesthatoncemarkedgraveswereremovedandstackedundernearby trees to clear the land for cultivation or for animal husbandry. African American family history is lost when the grave sites and homesteads of earlier generations are destroyed. The following five vignettes of historic African American communities (Milton , Blenheim, Redlands, Free State, and Hardin) illustrate how the landscapes of nineteenth-century lives are lost and why it is important to recover them. These communities were chosen because of the archival, ethnohistoric, and mortuary evidence that survives to document the lives of the African Americans who lived there. I also discuss the importance of preserving oral histories to document the memoriesassociated withthesehistoricplaces. Usinggraveyardsasastarting point forlocatingthecenterof thesenowvanishedcommunities,Ithenturntoindividual gravestones to recover information about the people in these earlier generations. Milton The historic community of Milton, along the Rivanna River, is about a mile from Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s “Little Mountain.” Milton was once home to a large tobacco warehouse and a thriving community, but as railroads and highways usurped the commercial roles of canals and rivers, the place and its people withered . Today, there are no businesses in Milton, just a combination of truly historic homes and other old and brand new residences. As in many parts of Albemarle County, the newest residents tend to be wealthy and move into large, custom-built 6 LOST COMMUNITIES OF THE DEAD 77 Lost Communities of the Dead homes, while the longtime residents often struggle to pay rising taxes on small homes that they have lived in for fifty years or more. In 2004, a University of Virginia librarian living in Milton called me about a rumored cemetery in her backyard. Her house, near a newly constructed road called Lafayette Lane, was built in the 1980s, but the ruins of nineteenth-century homes remained in the nearby woods. After walking around the area for about an hour amid the poison ivy and periwinkle, I failed to see any markers. But I was not ready to give up, so I contacted Billy Hearns. I had been told about Mr. Hearns’s family connections to the area by another longtime resident, Mary Reaves, who was descended from the last African American gatekeeper at nearby Monticello. Mr. Hearns kindly invited me to talk with him about his family history. I learned that his family had lived in Milton for more than 125 years and that he had grown up in his grandmother’s house in the 1930s. When he described its location, I realized it was only a couple hundred yards away from the librarian’s home. I had located the right person to ask about the cemetery. FormerlyajanitorforaUniversityof Virginiafraternity,Mr.Hearnsboastedthat he had worked for forty-seven years and only took one day off during that time. He proudly showed me signed yearbooks that the fraternity brothers had given him in recognition of his many decades of service and talked about the large going-away party they threw for him when he finally retired in 2008. Mr. Hearns now repairs old-fashioned lawn mowers and plays piano for a local church. I brought my dulled pushmowerwithmesoIcouldmultitaskwhileaskinghimif heknewof acemetery near his old family homestead. Mr. Hearns took me out to his cinder-block garage, which he had turned into a workshop, for our interview. It was the final resting place of grass-cutting devices; pieces were strewn everywhere without a complete lawn mower in sight. He began telling me about his grandmother Mattie while testing the few moving parts on the machine I had brought. He reminisced about the home where he grew up and immediately remembered the spot I was asking about. He insisted on accompanying me there, in his youthful seventh decade of life. Mr. Hearns was excited about seeing the cemetery; his last visit was a distant memory and appears to have occurred in the early 1970s. We drove out to a periwinkle cluster behind the librarian’s house. There was dense ground cover with fallen tree limbs, poison ivy, and rodent holes to avoid. I was worried that Mr. Hearns would trip and spent more time watching him than the ground. We searched for more than an hour, until the sun began to set. Just...

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