RECLAIMING HISTORY WITH GEOPHYSICS: USING GROUND-PENETRATING RADAR TO CONFIRM THE LOCATIONS OF ANTEBELLUM AFRICAN-AMERICAN CEMETERIES

While white Civil War era and antebellum historical cemeteries are generally well preserved and documented, this is often not the case for their contemporary African-American counterparts. The cemeteries of enslaved persons, frequently poorly marked and documented in the first place, were often cleared of their fieldstones in later decades for purposes of cultivation or raising livestock. Many of the locations of these sites, and therefore the family histories belonging to them, have been lost over time, and others are known only through oral history or ambiguous records. In some cases, remaining fieldstones and/or depressions lend support to the histories, but this is not always the case. As any attempt to verify the location of a cemetery should be conducted in such a way as to respect the individuals potentially buried there, non-invasive geophysical methods such as ground-penetrating radar (GPR) can be particularly helpful.

We collected GPR data at three suspected antebellum slave cemeteries in Virginia (two at National Trust Historic Sites-Belle Grove Plantation, and James Madison’s Montpelier, and one on private land-Corhaven Graveyard in Quicksburg, VA.) with the goals of confirming that the locations were in fact cemeteries, and identifying individual burial sites within each cemetery to the extent possible. We also conducted a GPR survey at one free-black cemetery (Newton, in Harrisonburg, VA.) dating to the years immediately following emancipation, with the goal of identifying individual burial sites for a fifteen-year period during which records were either not maintained or subsequently lost.