Archaeologists are mapping a historic cemetery in Harrisonburg with ground penetrating radar: a non-invasive way for researchers to see underneath the earth's surface, revealing structures – and people – at risk of being lost to time. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi reports.
[sounds of wind blowing, crickets chirping]
More than 150 years ago, shortly after the Civil War, five men from Harrisonburg's African American community, called Newtown, purchased three plots of land from a former plantation and established a cemetery there. Records filed with the National Register of Historic Places detail that this was a multidenominational burial ground – not connected to one church, but available to "all persons of color."
A new grant of nearly $20,000 from Virginia's Historical African American Cemetery and Graves Fund will allow the local community to peer underground and back in time with a ground penetrating radar survey.
[sound of radar device rolling along the ground]
The machine looks sort of like an oversized, white lawnmower with an antenna and laptop attached. Archaeologists with the firm TerraSearch Geophysical, based in Williamsburg, Virginia and Connecticut, recently spent four days carefully pushing it across the grounds.
KURT FREDRICKSON: It's like a Doppler radar – sends out a radio wave. It hits different variations of [machine beeps] moisture that are contained within the ground, and different features in the ground. Pits or graves or rocks or other materials hold different amounts of water, and the radar reflects off of those in different ways.
Kurt Fredrickson is one of TerraSearch's ground penetrating radar operators.
FREDRICKSON: It turns that into a picture, and then because of the sub-centimeter accuracy of it, we can actually make a three-dimensional map and see different shapes in the ground, and through our experience we can say, "that's a grave, or that's a post hole, or that's a foundation for a house, or that's a brick wall."
This technology reveals human activities long scrubbed from the surface – such as plow scars from the early 1800s, as TerraSearch Director of Geophysics David Givens and Cemetery Trustee and Archaeologist Carole Nash discussed.
DAVID GIVENS: See how ephemeral they are? And they're really close-set.
CAROLE NASH: And they're aligned.
GIVENS: Oh, look at them all.
NASH: And that would be barley – that would be the barley field.
Givens told WMRA it will be months before they're done sorting through all the data, but they suspect there are hundreds of unmarked graves here. He sees that a lot in this line of work.
GIVENS: I just did a cemetery down in Chesapeake. There were 15 gravestones and I found 222 people. … We often forget these spaces, and they're all over our world.
KAREN THOMAS: We've heard that there are more graves up here than we ever imagined.
Cemetery Trustee Karen Thomas, who has family buried here, said the community is eager to learn what the survey unearths. Many of Newtown's historical figures are interred here – including educator Lucy Simms, city councilman Elon Rhodes, and carpenter Ambrose Dallard.
THOMAS: A lot of our older people, they'll tell you that, "well I remember when so-and-so was buried down this way somewhere, but we don't know where it is anymore." This way, we might be able to find out who that person is, that's in that coffin, from the mapping. We're really excited about it.
The grant fund is administered by the Virginia Department of Historic Resources for the care, documentation, preservation, and protection of historic African American burial grounds. The institutions of slavery and segregation dictated the establishment of separate cemeteries for many Black communities throughout American history, and their impact on racial wealth inequality has, in some places, constrained the community funding available for maintenance and research.
When Newtown Cemetery was founded, the white-owned Woodbine Cemetery was memorializing Confederate soldiers, and restricting where African Americans could be buried – for example, some were sold "rear plats," but they were explicitly forbidden from using the mausoleum.
Nash noted that environmental factors have taken their toll on Newtown Cemetery – such as acid rain, which reached its modern heyday around the 1980s.
NASH: We have acid rain more under control today, but the damage that it did is very visible in all the cemeteries in the Valley. The marble tombstones, sometimes it's even difficult to read the names on them now because it's almost like the rock was melting.
The lived reality of local residents – such as the "urban renewal" displacement of Black families in the 1950s and 60s – also leaves its mark underground.
NASH: We know that people who had businesses, we know that families moved on, and we see that here in the cemetery because we know that families had plots and some of them are not filled, because they're no longer here to be buried in this place. So when you have … a place like this cemetery that is, not only the anchor for the community today, but the reminder of what it took to be here – that's what this cemetery does. So I'm always humbled when I walk in here. I always say hello to people – [laughs] – in the ground. I'm like, "how are you doing today?" But I do that precisely because I know what it means. We love the science, we love doing this kind of work, but we are always keeping in mind that it matters. It matters to the people.
After finishing their report, the researchers plan to hold public meetings to unveil the project's findings.
