The Hidden History of African-American Burial Sites in the Antebellum South

The Avoca Museum in Altavista, Virginia, sits on what was once the property of Colonel Charles Lynch. In 2005, a graveyard was discovered in the grounds. Now known as the Enslaved Persons Cemetery, it holds at least 32 graves, which were once marked by local stones without inscriptions. The stones were still there, but had been moved from the graves. Museum director Michael Hudson is committed to preserving and honoring the cemetery.  

In order to find the exact location of the bodies beneath Avoca’s grounds, to illuminate the past for the broader Lynchburg community, a geolocation radar tool was used to detect the depth of compromised soil (unsurprisingly, usually six to seven feet under). This meant the graves didn’t have to be dug up, an option Hudson says was out of the question. Other general clues that it was a cemetery included the irregularly shaped rocks, a trend found in slave cemeteries across several states, which tended to be naturally occurring field stones like marble and granite found in the vicinity of the slave holder’s house.

At Avoca, Hudson says, “Some of them are in the shape of a human eye, kind of like an oval with points on the end.” According to local African-American families, growing up they were told that the purpose of this rock shape was to symbolize that the eyes of the dead watch over the living. The deliberate patterns in these rocks was a black mortuary tradition usually marking adult graves. Children’s graves were demarcated by a stone even more cherished; in some family circles, pink quartz indicated a child’s grave. At Avoca in particular, two quartz markers were uncovered, visibly unchanged from their natural state. “The graves we have that are covered with pink quartz, two of those graves are short. [They’re] tiny and little graves,” Hudson says.

The cemetery at Avoca is more or less like many other cemeteries of enslaved people that are still being discovered across the South. Read more about them at Atlas Obscura.

(Image Courtesy of Avoca Museum)


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