Hidden History: African American Cemeteries in Central Virginia

1: Finding Zion

On a crisp fall Saturday in 2008, following a lead in attempting to locate a “BurtonFamilyCemetery,” Itraveled down aruralVirginialaneto anAfrican American church cemetery. When I arrived, I found the churchyard deserted, with only silent stone sentinels to note my approach. The gravestones mark each life, often clustered into families, illustrating untold histories. I document each stone, one person at a time. Later, I will upload the photos and inscriptions to a website where I have collected six thousand other memorials from historic African American cemeteries in central Virginia. I have visited over 150 such cemeteries in a multicounty area; of these, I have documented 118 with maps, photographs, and additional research. This includes morethansixthousandindividualstones,datingbetween1800and2000.Butmany more unmarked or forgotten burials remain to be photographed and recorded. There is no good way to estimate the number of African American burials in Virginiabetweenthenineteenthandtwentiethcenturies ,butwecanreviewthecensus figures for one Virginia county and estimate the number of deaths per one thousand individuals per year. The U.S. Slave Census for Albemarle County, Virginia, illustrates that the enslaved population more than doubled between 1790 and 1860, from 5,579 individuals to 13,916;1 the number of deaths would have paralleled this increase in births if it were a closed population with no out-migration. To the contrary , Albemarle County would have experienced in-migration from the Tidewater and out-migration to other southern states (especially Kentucky and Tennessee). Not knowing those migration figures precisely,we can crudely estimate that at least six thousand individuals (or approximately eighty-six per year) died in Albemarle Countypriortoemancipationwhileenslavedonaplantationorasmallfamilyfarm. Only a fraction of their graves have been located.2 Another way to calculate the number of African American burials for a given time period is to search death certificates for the county and add up the number 1 FINDING ZION 2 hidden history of reported deaths. In Virginia, death certificates were not officially collected until 1912.InAlbemarleCounty,theCharlottesvilleAfricanAmericanGenealogyGroup transcribed 8,088 death certificates for burials that occurred between 1917 and 2001. As a crude estimate of mortality, that translates to ninety-six burials per year over an eighty-four-year period. Hundredsof these individuals lie buried on family land insmall,sometimesforgottengraveyards.Sometimesthesebodiesreemergeinsurprising ways, as when an old cemetery is discovered because of a modern construction project. In other instances, remains are lost, forever buried under unmarked ground. We lose important pieces of local and family history when we allow these sacred sites to go unrecorded and disappear. Origins In 2001, I was hired to teach at Sweet Briar College, the site of a former plantation willed byitsnineteenth-centuryownerto become aschoolfor women.Thecollege hasretainedmuchof itsoriginalagriculturalland.Hundredsof historicandarchaeological sites remain on the three-thousand-acre campus. The plantation owners’ cemetery was well known to the campus community. Every year students and faculty would march up to the plantation graveyard and lay flowers at the grave of the founder and her daughter, in whose honor the school was founded. Situated atop a high hill, containing tall obelisks and surrounded by a stone wall, this cemetery was hard to miss. But the resting place of the enslaved individuals who worked on the plantation had been lost to modern memory. Fortuitously, a riding instructor at the college had spent years exploring the fields and, just before his retirement, announced the discovery of an unmarked cemetery, overgrown with brush. He had located the plantation’s slave burial ground. As the college proceeded with plans to erect a memorial, I mapped the cemetery and began researching the individuals who were anonymously buried under the gravestones; as is often the case in slave cemeteries, none of the markers were inscribed. In my research of three dozen antebellum cemeteries, which include 406 individual slave gravestones, I’ve found less than 5 percent of the markers to be inscribed . There are a few explanations for this. A law was passed in Virginia in 1831 that made it illegal to teach “free Negroes” or slaves how to read and write.3 We know from many sources that this law was not always followed, but if you were black and literate, carving a tombstone would be damning evidence to anyone who wanted to make trouble. The urge to carve gravestones is closely tied to a sense of individualism and the desire to know where each individual is buried. Yet within manyenslavedcommunities,kinwereforciblyseparatedthroughsales,inheritance, ordeath.Giventhefragilityof theirfamilystructure,thesecommunitiesdeveloped 3 Finding Zion extended and multigenerational kinship connections to safeguard domestic ties...