This past weekend my cousin Teresa came up from Georgia for a visit, and for us to attend the unveiling of a slave cemetery that was recently discovered here in York County. It was an amazing, beautiful event. There was a keynote speaker, a professor from UNCC, who talked a bit about the history of how slaves would have buried their own in past centuries, and then a panel discussison with him, the owner of the property who found the first graves on his property and really pushed to find historians and archaelogists to see exactly what they’d found, and the chairman of the Nations Ford Land Trust, the group that works on preserving historically significant lands in this area. Very interesting. Then we walked about a quarter of a mile to the site. Each grave that had been discovered – all 144 of them – had been marked with a stone with a number on them, because of course there is no record of any names. It was very interesting learning about how they actually found each grave. They think that there are more graves there – maybe many more – but the criteria they decided on was that they would call it an official site if they could locate at least three corners. Just walking along down the trail and then coming upon this site was sort of haunting.
There were maybe four of these original stones, which is what tipped the owners off to the fact that it may have been a cemetery. There was some chiseling on the rock, but we learned during the program that names were never on slaves markers, because it was against the law for a slave to know how to read or write, so any stone mason that put a name on there would have been immediately put to death. It was just a very special day.
