DANVILLE, Va. (AP) — Just east of the National Cemetery on Lee Street lies a rolling green expanse of hills dotted with grave stones.
Known as the Freedman Cemetery, the city's nearly 8-acre, first Black cemetery dating back at least 160 years is being examined by the city of Danville for identification of unmarked graves. So far, a firm using ground-penetrating radar has located what are believed to be 418 unmarked graves in the multi-phase interment location project.
The goal of the project started in August 2021 is to collect and document a history of the cemetery and those buried there. City officials hope to beautify the old cemetery and add kiosks and historic markers for visitors.
Phase one was completed last year with a result of more than 400 interments located and a report containing a history of the cemetery completed by Rivanna Archeological Services in Charlottesville.
The second phase will work to locate more unmarked graves.
Each grave from the two phases of the project will receive a stainless-steel marker with a unique identifier and a GPS point will be collected. Those points will be used to map and update cemetery records.
"It's (the cemetery) been in city ownership and maintenance for years," said Renee Burton, planning consultant for the city. "We've been maintaining it for years. It just hasn't received a lot of attention."
Officials want to learn more about the history of the cemetery and the people buried there.
"We want to figure out what that history is before we honor them properly," Burton said.
For years, Danville resident Dean Hairston has been researching the genealogies of those buried there.
There are about 2,000 Black people — many of them who died while enslaved and others who were born into slavery but died free after the Civil War — buried in Freedman Cemetery, Hairston said.
During their span of time in this world, they filled a variety of professions — from carpenters to shoemakers, physicians to janitors, barbers to tobacco workers.
Hairston, deputy police chief with the Danville Police Department, developed an interest in the cemetery years ago, and would visit it and walk through it while working his beat.
"Not too long ago, I started recording the names from the stones and started going to ancestry.com, and then tracing the history and going to the genealogical section of the library and researching their names," Hairston said.
According to the report from Rivanna, Freedman Cemetery, like the neighboring National Cemetery, was carved out of the 34-acre Green Hill park and cemetery property bought by what was then the town of Danville in 1863.
The report estimates Freedman Cemetery was most likely established between 1866 and 1873, during Reconstruction.
"No formal deed of sale for the ... 7.75-acre Danville Freedman's Cemetery was found during archival research," the report states. "Because of this, it is assumed that the cemetery continued to be owned by the town of Danville."
The report mentions that "at least one prominent source states" that a man named Moses M. Green donated the cemetery to the town of Danville, but casts doubt on that story. But because Moses Green's mother was Black, he may have had some connection to the establishment of the cemetery, the report states.
Few options
Black residents in Danville had few options for public burial during the post-emancipation period, the report states.
"No public burying ground accepting African-Americans existed in the town of Danville until the establishment of the Danville Freedman's Cemetery," the report states. "The Danville Freedman's Cemetery then was established out of necessity."
It is not known who managed the cemetery. But during the first 50 years after emancipation, many Black cemeteries in the U.S. were managed by benevolent or mutual aid societies and other charitable organizations.
"Within post-emancipation African-American society, these social groups helped their members and the broader community during financial difficulty, often providing aid to the elderly and poor, and during sickness and death," the report states.
The cemetery had been neglected by the city and overgrown before Danville removed broken stones in the 1960s or 1970s so the site could be mowed, Hairston said. Those broken stones were used to fill in ditches, he said.
Hairston found out in his research that they were also put to other uses.
"I came across someone who had taken the stones out of the cemetery," he said. "They had a house on Holbrook Street and were using them for steps. It turned out the people said they had gotten the stones out of a ditch and found them discarded. That's why they were using them."
At the cemetery, it's easy to spot the difference between the neighboring, largely white National Cemetery with neat plots with gravestones and the spotty, sparsely-marked Freedman Cemetery.
During slavery, the graves of enslaved Black people didn't get stones, but were marked by painted rocks instead — an African cultural tradition, Hairston said.
Freedman Cemetery pre-dates Reconstruction and the Civil War era, Hairston said, estimating that about 30%-40% of those buried there died during slavery. Others interred there were born in slavery, but died free after the war, he added.
Others were born after slavery. People were buried there through the mid-20th century into the 1960s, Hairston said.
Prominent residents
There are prominent people buried at Freedman, Hairston pointed out.
Nathaniel Holbrook, who was enslaved by Levi Holbrook and founded the first Black funeral home in Danville, is buried there, Hairston said.
Another man, Spy Allen, was born into slavery but died a free man. His grave is symbolically marked with three links of a chain.
Hairston said he plans to donate his genealogical research information to the city for use in its database.
Ground penetrating radar involves sending it below the surface to see if there are anomalies underneath, Burton said.
"It cannot tell you what's there," she said. "It can give the size and width of what's there."
Phase one of the project cost about $16,500, but about $11,500 was paid for by a grant from the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Phase two will cost $18,209, with $12,709 to be covered by a grant from the department, Burton said.
The city is paying for the remainder of the project's costs.
The first two phases of the project are limited to a two-acre section of the cemetery. But the city plans to eventually cover the remainder of the site, Burton said.
