Razing the Dead
Lowcountry develolpers disturb slave graves and lock out family members
BY JOHN VERNELSON
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Sarah Middleton is 100 years old and lives alone in a small frame
house in Charleston County where her family has lived for more than 200
years. Her granddaughters, Willie Mae Green Grant and Bertha Lee Sanders,
and other family members also live on the family-owned land.
Although Middleton is relatively healthy and surrounded by people who
love and care for her, something is missing from her life: she has been
barred from visiting the graves of her father, a husband, and a son for
almost a half-century. The Old Alston Cemetery where they are buried was
closed to her and other African-American families in the mid-1950s by the
property owners.
Old Alston Cemetery is off Parkers Ferry Road near Jacksonboro, about
25 miles south of Charleston. The graveyard is several hundred yards off
Parkers Ferry, concealed by woods and dense undergrowth. A locked metal
gate and a fence surround the property.
Middleton's home is less than five miles away but it might as well be
500, say her granddaughters, who remember visiting the cemetery as little
girls.
"We moved in with our grandmother when I was about nine years old,"
said Grant. "When [Middleton] sent us out to gather firewood, we always
seemed to end up at the cemetery. But now there are too many woods and
fences and gates in the way. I hope my grandmother gets to visit Old
Alston before she dies."
Sarah Middleton has been unable to visit the graves of several family members since the 1950s. |
King Cemetery, which dates to the 1850s, is about a half-mile off
Highway 17S on property known locally as Encampment Plantation just north
of Parkers Ferry Road.
Middleton said many of her friends and acquaintances are buried at
King Cemetery, and she remembers walking in funeral processions to the
graveyard on "the Old Road," a tree-lined lane that still runs from what
is now known as Highway 17S to the cemetery.
In those days, Middleton said "the body was laid out" in the home for
bathing and dressing and other burial preparations. Coffins were built at
or near the home of the deceased and then loaded onto horse-drawn wagons.
Middleton remembers following "death wagons" in many funeral processions
along the Old Road to King Cemetery.
"We dressed in black and sang hymns," she said. "If the funeral was
late, some of us carried torches. It was a long time ago, but I still
remember it."
Sanders and Grant said their grandmother wants to visit King Cemetery,
and hopes that Old Alston will someday be opened to her.
"In those days," Grant said, "the people who owned the land set aside
certain areas for blacks to bury, and then after generations
often after the land was sold
the
land where the graveyards were located were closed to us and we were no
longer allowed to bury there or ever visit again. Perhaps the opening of
King Cemetery will lead to the opening of other African-American
cemeteries before too many more of the old people die and it is too late
for them to visit the graves of their loved ones."
King Cemetery wasn't rediscovered or reopened by accident. It first
came to attention about a year ago in a dispute between Charleston County
and the owners of land adjacent to the proposed site for a county dirt
mine. The county said it needed the dirt for road work in that part of the
county.
Russ and Lee Pye, owners of the adjacent land, said the thousands of
gallons of water that would be pumped hourly from the 40-foot-deep,
20-acre pit would destroy the cemetery. The proposed mine site is part of
the 750-acre Sheppard Tract, land the county bought for $1.5 million in
1991 to use as a burial ground for ash produced by the county's waste
incinerator. The Sheppard Tract is part of what was once known as
Encampment Plantation. The mine site borders the Pye property and is about
200 feet from King Cemetery, which is on land owned by Westvaco
Corporation.
Construction in the Lowcountry often means competing with archaeological and preservation interests. |
Meanwhile, Charleston County paid an Atlanta company $11,000 for an
archaeological survey of the cemetery in early February to determine its
boundaries and the number of graves therein. About 156 graves were
discovered, including four in a fire lane not previously believed to be
within the borders of the graveyard.
Dr. Michael Trinkley, executive director of the Chicora Foundation, a
Columbia-based nonprofit group dedicated to preserving the archaeological
and cultural resources of the Carolinas, found two other graves on land
that borders King Cemetery.
"It looks as if King Cemetery might be much larger than previously
believed," Trinkley said at the site shortly after the county's
archaeological survey was completed. "I probed only for 15 minutes or so
and located the two graves on the Pyes' land."
Trinkley, the Pyes and others who viewed the cemetery after the survey
said they were shocked at the way equipment operators scraped the boundary
around the cemetery. One witness said bulldozers were used, but the county
said the work was done with a backhoe.
Trinkley, on the other hand, had no complaint. Deputy State
Archaeologist Dr. Jon Leader agreed, saying Garrow and Associates did "an
excellent job."
But the dispute between the Pyes and the county is about more than the
dirt mine and its effect on King Cemetery. There are other
"archaeologically sensitive" areas near the juncture where land owned by
the Pyes, Westvaco and Charleston County come together, including a
Revolutionary War encampment; the site of the Stono Slave Rebellion of
1739; and the home of Robert Young Hayne, elected governor of South
Carolina in 1832.
The dispute over the cemetery and the dirt mine has drawn the interest
of Duke University professor Peter H. Wood, author of a prize-winning
book, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 to
the Stono Rebellion. Wood said, "The field where the insurrection was
quelled lay near Jacksonboro, as is clear in contemporary accounts, and
apparently that site was on the ground now under dispute."
There are other "archaeologically sensitive" sites on the 750 acres
owned by the county, according to an archaeological survey conducted by
Garrow and Associates. On one site glass beads and burned bead fragments
were found that "may represent a ritualistic practice associated with a
slave burial," the survey said.
Other sites discovered in the survey include two "slave rows"
associated with Encampment Plantation; a late 19th early 20th century
domestic site with an unknown prehistoric component (Native American); and
artifacts from several other prehistoric and historic sites.
In the meantime, the Pyes offered to buy a 35-acre parcel of the
county's land that includes the dirt-mine site in late February, but the
county turned them down, saying the land is worth more than the
$1,000-an-acre offer. The county paid $2,000 an acre.
If the county had accepted their offer, the Pyes had intended to give
it to Oak Hall Plantation Inc., a nonprofit corporation whose purpose is
to preserve "archaeologically sensitive" land in the area. Oak Hall
Plantation was created by the Pyes.
The land would also have been used as a buffer for King Cemetery, and
the Pyes promised in their offer-to-buy document to provide access to the
cemetery from Highway 17. Also included in land donations to Oak Hall
Plantation, but not included in the purchase offer, are four acres already
owned by the Pyes to be used for the cultivation of sweet grass, a type of
straw used for making baskets by Lowcountry artisans in the tradition of
their African ancestors.
A week after refusing the Pyes' offer, Charleston County Council
withdrew its application for the permits needed to build the dirt mine. At
first blush that would appear to be a step in the right direction. But
Charleston County is not giving up on its plan to bury incinerator ash on
the Sheppard Tract.
Nor is it going to revise its plans for the ash landfill complex in a
way that would allow it to jettison the need for the pit required for the
dirt mine.
You can expect Charleston County Council to renew its permit
applications and try a little harder the second time around to meet the
permitting requirements of state law as well as one of its own ordinances
that prohibits development of historically and archaeologically
significant land.
