Geophysicist Mark Howard pushes a black and yellow machine over the short grass in Freedmen’s Cemetery, where almost all of Danville’s Black residents were buried for over a century.
The machine is about the size of a lawnmower, but it’s not cutting grass. It’s using radar to penetrate the ground and find unmarked graves.
The machine, called a Noggin Plus, sends a wavelength into the ground. It bounces off items buried in the earth and returns to the transmitter, Howard said.
“We look for patterns in the data, and that’s how we determine a burial,” he said. “To most people, it just looks like black and white squiggly lines. … But we run over the same spot multiple times, and if we see the same pattern, then we can say with confidence that it’s a burial.”
When he finds a burial, he notes the location, and a small silver disc is put in the ground to indicate that someone is buried there. The discs are numbered, and the numbers correspond to a mark on a larger map system that the city is compiling.
Established in the late 1860s or early 1870s, Freedmen’s Cemetery was the only place in the city where Black people were allowed to be buried for many years. Fewer than 30 above-ground markers remain to indicate graves across the almost 8-acre cemetery, with no known cemetery log to identify those buried.
“We speculate that some of the rocks, like that big blue stone over there, were probably markers, but we can’t say for sure,” said Renee Burton, Danville’s director of planning and zoning. “And it’s been over 100 years, of course the land shifts.”
Burton and her department began a project to identify the locations of unmarked graves at Freedman’s Cemetery around five years ago.
It started as a beautification project, she said, since the cemetery had been “overlooked” and many folks in Danville didn’t know that it existed. Before work got started, Burton said she realized that the project needed to include preservation as well.
“We thought we were going to create a road so that people could have vehicular access, which would encourage people to come out,” she said. “Then we had the idea, maybe we should check what’s in the ground, and thank goodness we did.”
So far, the ground-penetrating radar team has found almost 1,600 unmarked graves at Freedman’s Cemetery.
The fourth and final phase of that work is almost complete, and after that, the beautification will finally begin.
Burton said she hopes that after the project is complete, more residents will be aware of Freedman’s Cemetery and its history.
“The goal is to be able to provide access to our citizens, and provide some type of markers or kiosks to let them know what the cemetery is,” she said. “It’s a beautiful place, it’s just tucked away and most people don’t know about it.”
The history of Freedman’s Cemetery
Freedmen’s Cemetery sits on rolling hills between the Danville National Cemetery, which was originally used to bury Union prisoners of war in the city during the Civil War, and Green Hill Cemetery, where white residents, including Confederate soldiers, were buried.
Freedmen’s Cemetery was carved out of land that was originally part of Green Hill, but the exact date of its establishment and earliest burials are unknown, according to a report by Chronicle Heritage, a cultural resource management company that the city contracted to create a historical report of the cemetery.
“A cartographic review of the cemetery area indicates that by at least the 1870s, the cemetery was named and clearly delineated from the neighboring Green Hill Cemetery,” the 2023 report says. “Burials began as early as the 1870s and lasted until the 1960s.”
It’s likely that people were buried here even before this point, the report says, but there’s no official record of the land being used as a cemetery until after the Civil War.
It’s “a place where almost all of the city’s Black citizens were buried for over a century,” the report says, as the Black population was “denied equal burial rights with white contemporaries.”
By the turn of the 20th century, other cemeteries in the city became available for Black burials, like the Oak Hill Cemetery near the Almagro community, one of Danville’s oldest Black neighborhoods, the report says.
But before then, Freedmen’s Cemetery was the only place in Danville to bury Black residents. It remained separated from Green Hill Cemetery by a barbed wire fence until about 1970, and a low stone wall still runs between it and the Danville National Cemetery.
Freedmen’s Cemetery is mostly open land, covered in grass with a few tall trees. Scattered headstones indicate the few marked graves.
Some headstones have chains engraved on them, signifying that that person was enslaved at the time of death, Burton said. There are others, though far fewer, with broken chains, indicating that that person was free.
Much of the writing on the headstones has been worn away.
Across the stone wall, rows of clean, white headstones roll across the green lawn. Union soldiers, who had mostly died of disease in Confederate prisons in Danville, were initially buried here in mass graves. In 1866, the National Cemetery was established to reinter those soldiers into formal graves.
In the Green Hill Cemetery, the grave markers are often large and ornate, with many designated family plots, statues and above-ground mausoleums. Roadways and walkways cut through the cemetery.
“Generally speaking, everyone in [Green Hill] was very well-to-do, which you can tell by their large markers and mausoleums,” Burton said.
There was a disparity in cemetery maintenance over the years, according to the Chronicle Heritage report.
The “present state of disrepair” at Freedmen’s Cemetery can be traced to an initial commitment, and then a reversal of public funding in the late 1800s as Jim Crow policies took effect.
During those years, resources for upkeep and recordkeeping were often not provided for rural cemeteries in the United States, especially Black cemeteries, the report says.
This is why no official records for the exact number, dates, identities or locations of burials exist for Freedmen’s Cemetery.
There’s evidence that early maintenance and care of the cemetery grounds was taken on by Danville’s Black population, as well as by mutual aid societies operating in the city and the greater South after Emancipation, the report says.
By the 20th century, maintenance and upkeep of Freedmen’s Cemetery, and the neighboring cemeteries, had become the responsibility of the city, as all three cemeteries are on city-owned land.
“However, maintenance and care of the Freedmen’s Cemetery and Green Hill Cemetery was not always equitable,” according to a report put together by Rivanna Archeological Services, which contracted NAEVA Geophysics, a Charlottesville-based subsurface detection company, for the ground-penetrating radar work.
The report includes a 1972 quote from a Danville Register reporter who described Green Hill Cemetery and the National Cemetery as receiving “immaculate and perpetual care,” whereas Freedmen’s Cemetery “looks like a farmer’s unused tobacco field gone to seed.”
The disrepair that Freedmen’s Cemetery had fallen into prompted the city to undertake a beautification project by around 2020, which has now turned into a full-blown preservation effort.
Locating unmarked graves and adding historical context
The multiphase project to locate unmarked burials at Freedmen’s Cemetery, which began about five years ago, is almost complete.
The city received grant funding from the Virginia Department of Historic Resources for the first two phases of the project. The first phase cost about $16,500, with about $11,500 funded by DHR, and the second phase cost about $18,200, with $12,700 funded by DHR, according to a 2022 article in the Danville Register & Bee. The city is paying the rest of the project’s cost, the article says.
“We’ve taken the entire cemetery … and broken it into 40-foot tracts, or a grid pattern,” Burton said. “That’s how we’ve been combing through it.”
The fourth phase of this work is likely in the oldest section of the cemetery, Burton said. The city is working with NAEVA to accomplish this.
Senior geologist and geophysicist Howard and geologist Ryan Swaffar were at Freedmen’s Cemetery on a recent January Thursday looking for interments with the Noggin Plus.
The machine has a screen that reads the wavelengths emitted into the ground. Howard and Swaffar know what to look for, although it might seem like gibberish to a layman’s eyes.
“I like to tell people that television has done a terrible job of representing what this work does,” Howard said. “I think it’s Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg has a scene where they’re using radar — well, it actually doesn’t even look like radar, but that’s what they’re calling it — and they see dinosaur bones. That’s not how this looks at all.”
The screen doesn’t show bones or anything else that looks like a recognizable grave.
Black and white undulating lines show up on the screen, and Howard keeps an eye out for hyperbolas, or curves, as he pushes the Noggin Plus across the grass.
The machine measures the time between when the wavelength is emitted and when it returns to the transmitter. It’s measured in nanoseconds, and that’s how Howard can tell the depth of something in the earth.
“These are all very shallow,” he said, pointing at the squiggles on the screen. “I think these are just tree roots. … If it shows up very shallow, we’re probably not going to call that a grave.”
Most graves in the U.S. are in an east-west orientation, Howard said. So he and Swaffar run their survey lines north to south, so they’d scan a potential grave multiple times.
“If we see this same pattern on the next couple of lines then we can say with confidence that’s a burial,” he said. “We can tell the location and the depth, and if there’s a concrete vault or anything. Beyond that there’s not really any details we can discern.”
There are challenges with burials that are so old, he said. In some Colonial cemeteries, enslaved people were buried in cloth shrouds instead of caskets, which makes it nearly impossible for the machine to detect them.
In Freedmen’s Cemetery, most of the burials include caskets, from what Howard can tell.
“When it’s a fairly fresh burial, there’s an air pocket around the casket,” he said. “That’s easy to pick up with the radar. But over time, that casket decays, the air pocket collapses and it’s more difficult to see. Oftentimes, we can still see the grave shaft.”
The soil at Freedman’s Cemetery is conducive to this work, he said. The machine works best in silty or sandy soils, and it has a harder time reading in clay soils.
“Here the soil is OK. It’s not perfect but it’s good enough, it’s doable,” Howard said.
When a grave is located, the city puts a small, numbered, silver marker in the ground to acknowledge it.
“I think that’s pretty cool and unique. I haven’t seen that before,” Howard said. “We’ve done a lot of these surveys, and nobody else has done that.”
There had been no previous archaeological research within Freedman’s Cemetery — or the adjacent Green Hill and National cemeteries — before this project began, according to the Rivanna report.
The report includes maps and figures for the burials that have been found through this work so far. Each phase has turned up several hundred unmarked burials, categorized into “high-confidence,” “medium-confidence” and “low-confidence” graves.
As of Jan. 9, the project had identified 1,582 graves.
Though many residents of Danville are unaware or uninformed about the cemetery, there are signs that some people remember those buried there, Burton said.
American flags have been showing up at some of the few marked graves, which are not part of the city’s project, she said.
“We have no idea who’s putting them there, but please call us, we’d love to know what you know,” she said.
After this final phase of radar work is complete, the city will begin the beautification process, Burton said.
This will include making the entrance to the cemetery, which currently just looks like a grassy path, more identifiable. It will also include a roadway through the cemetery and historical information.
“We want to put a sign out and informative panels or something, to help people understand what this is,” Burton said. “The families and those that are buried here deserve that respect.”
