A ceremony to recall and commemorate the lives of the people of Sewanee’s St. Mark’s community whose graves in the historic cemetery have vanished over the many generations.

Please join us and participate in the placing of hand-forged bronze grave markers, each surmounted by a figurative dogwood blossom and especially designed to mark the 148 lost graves in the historic Black graveyard in Sewanee’s University Cemetery.

The event will be at 2:30 p.m., Sunday, Oct. 18, at the University Cemetery, 242 Georgia Ave.

From the early 1870s until 1965, the University of the South maintained a separate cemetery for Sewanee’s Black residents. In the spring of 2022, the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation hired a team of archaeologists to perform a ground-penetrating-radar scan of the historic Black burial ground. The scan discovered 148 unmarked graves and another ten marked only by a common fieldstone. Our archival research has been unable to identify any of the persons in the graves, but we are confident that their descendants can be found in Black church communities and cemeteries throughout Franklin County today.

Over the last three years, the Roberson Project has worked with the people whose family members are buried in the historic burial ground to design a special marker to be placed on each of the unmarked graves. The result is a bronze spike, hand-forged in the foundry of the University of the South’s Department of Art and surmounted by a figurative dogwood blossom.

We invite our neighbors from throughout Franklin County to the ceremony on October 18, when we will ask participants to place one of the bronze markers on the site of a lost grave.

The event is made possible by the generosity of the many friends of Sewanee’s Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation, including many University alumni and people with deep family roots in the historic Black St. Mark’s neighborhood. In addition, we are grateful to artists Greg Pond and Allie Cahoon and the Sewanee students who assisted them in arriving at a design and undertaking the extraordinary labor involved in forging the markers. We offer a special word of thanks to Adeline Pond, whose drawing inspired the dogwood blossom.

For more information contact Chris McCreary at <cjmccrea@sewanee.edu> or (931) 598-1685.