A relatively newly remembered burial ground yields more questions than answers as universities piece together missing links in the history of Georgia’s enslaved populations. GPB's Grant Blankenship has more on the effort.
Cicadas sang above a grove of magnolias and hardwoods as Maya Peters-Greno knelt over a small tombstone and cleaned it.
It was only a month ago when Peters-Greno, a history graduate student at the University of Georgia, first joined other volunteers here in Penfield, Ga., and saw this headstone and the dozens of others in the woods around her.
“And we were just, like — we didn't even know what to say,” Peters-Greno recalled.
The understory is filled with royal blue pin flags, a color compliment to the deep green of the trees. Each flag marks a spot where ground-penetrating radar indicated a forgotten grave in the years since this cemetery in the woods was rediscovered.
But the wall separating these graves from the well kept cemetery on the other side is what left Peters-Greno speechless.
“The cemetery wall was built so late,” she said. “They said it was the 1940s. 1950s.”
To Peters-Greno, that suggested one thing.
“Oh, so much hatred, I think.”
The wall is low and made of red brick.
On one side of the wall is the white cemetery, where many of the founding generation of Macon’s Mercer University and their kin, including Jesse Mercer himself, rest near the school’s original Penfield location about 80 miles northeast of Macon.
On the other side, under the trees, are the graves of African Americans dating back to the 1830s.
Until just a few years ago, when a white groundskeeper, John Colclough, elected to pass the knowledge on before he died, the existence of this space was forgotten and unknown to people at the present-day Mercer and even to those who grew up in nearby Greensboro, Ga.
Around the same time, a Mercer alumna in graduate study in history at the University of Edinburgh found records describing how what in the 19th century was still called the then-Mercer Institute was likely built by, and run through, enslaved labor.
Spencer Roberts, who leads digital initiatives at Emory’s Pitts Theological Library, coordinates these volunteer cleanup days at the Penfield site, which means chainsaw work and hauling limbs — clearing enough plant cover away in order to bring in that ground-penetrating radar to search for new graves.
He said he’s been organizing the workdays partly because Penfield might provide a model for Emory as it looks at its own history on its Oxford campus in Newton County.
Roberts said now, years into the work, he and others are beginning to put a number on the burials in this 4-acre site.
“We think there are about 1,500," he said. "So there's many more than you can see in there right now.”
That’s the high estimate, but over 1,000 burials have now been documented.
Documented, but unexplained.
“There's just not a big enough population in Penfield to ever have that kind of density,” Roberts said.
That’s because in the 1830s, Penfield was a center of learning, not population.
Mercer Institute was where, beginning not long after Indigenous people were forced from Georgia, the leaders of the state’s white-hot slavery-driven plantation economy educated their sons.
Mercer historian Doug Thompson said planters also loaned enslaved labor to the school.
“We have, through census data in the 1850s, a recognition that there was a large enslaved population in Penfield," Thompson said. "The cemeteries are confirmation of that."
The people were here, but working and not technically residents.
Meanwhile, Spencer Roberts suspects when enslaved people from the surrounding plantations died, planters saw burying them on tillable land that could otherwise be used for cotton as bad business, and so they looked here.
“And as you can see from the topography, it's not exactly a desirable piece of land,” Roberts said.
So, Roberts said, the planters may have looked to this hill plot as the place to bury the enslaved.
“Which would make this a communal enslaved person's burial ground, which is a unique thing,” Roberts said. “We don’t have very many of those in the South.”
Mercer’s Doug Thompson said that Black burials continued here in far higher numbers than did white burials in the years after slavery ended. But then they stopped in the 1950s, after the low, red brick wall went up.
“Part of what we're having to work through is, who made the decision about the wall itself going up and who made it go up?” Thompson asked.
Whomever that may have been, Thompson said their actions have had clear implications for generations of Mercer University students who have annually day tripped here since the 20th century for what’s still called the Penfield Pilgrimage.
“You stop learning about this economic system that was undergirding the development of Penfield,” Thompson said. “Which was slavery.”
You forget.
The first steps in remembering came when language introducing the Penfield African American Cemetery was added to the standard Penfield Pilgrimage tour for students.
The next steps have been coming slowly, one tombstone at a time, with volunteers like Maya Peters-Greno scrubbing away decades of dirt to reveal the names of the dead.
“That looks so much better,” Peters-Greno said quietly after she cleared away enough to read a name on the small broken headstone.
It read: "Fannie, daughter of B & E Story."
The surname, Story, was one the volunteers had not yet seen and another piece of history remembered.
