Black residents fear a 706-acre development could flood a historic cemetery. Now they’re trying to save it.
The graves weren’t far apart, but they were starkly different.
In one part of the informal, scattered cemetery was buried Harry Days, a Black man part of the first generation of Gullah people born into freedom, rather than slavery, in Horry County. His life was not easy, and he had to farm and do other manual labor to make a living, his great-great-granddaughter Dr. Veronica Gerald Floyd said, but he was born free, and cherished. Unlike other Black people buried in the area, Days’ grave had a headstone, though its inscription was faded from time and weather and difficult to read.
Not far away, though, was the grave of John Green. Green married the daughter of Joshua John Ward, the owner of more enslaved people in the United States than anyone else in the antebellum South. Green, having married into immense wealth, had a large, heavily inscribed headstone above his burial that extolled his virtues. Green, it read, was “an honest man, a good citizen, an affectionate husband and exemplary Christian.”
Both Days and Green are buried in what may seem an unlikely spot: Near the 13th hole of Blackmoor Golf Course in the Burgess area in Southern Horry County.
But it’s the location of the men’s graves — along with dozens of others, marked and unmarked — that have raised serious concerns for Burgess’ Black residents. Long before the informal cemetery sat beside a golf course, it was part of Ward’s collection of plantations, which had earned him the title “king of the rice planters.” The people Ward enslaved would bury their dead on the plantation, and, later, after emancipation, descendants of formerly enslaved people continued to bury loved ones near other family members. Residents in the Burgess area say the practice continued through the 1960s in some families.
That means that today, alongside the 13th fairway at Blackmoor, 100 or more people are buried, according to local historians and county technicians.
And locals in the Burgess community worry that a major development planned nearby — 3,800 new homes on 706 acres — could inadvertently damage the graves, meaning pieces of Black history in the area could be damaged or lost.
“My main thing right now is to do something to protect those three cemeteries,” said Cad Holmes, a local historian who has ancestors buried in the cemeteries. “That’s where all of our ancestors are at. They worked hard, they provided for us.”
Those concerns have sparked a grassroots effort to protect the historic cemeteries that some residents fear could be damaged by new development. Decisions about the development and the cemeteries will come in 2022; the project must still have another hearing before the Planning Commission, as well as three hearings before county council. Late February is the earliest the project could win approval.
And such approval could be difficult to win. Al Jordan, president of the Greater Burgess Community Association, said Friday that his group is opposing the project, calling plans “incomplete” and highlighting concerns about a lack of infrastructure in the area. Other Burgess residents, earlier this month, said they worry about traffic jams and wrecks on S.C. 707, flooding, and nearby schools that are already over capacity.
And then there’s the matter of the cemeteries.
Holmes an others worry that building new homes, apartment buildings, stores and parking lots on the nearby 706-acre tract of land could force additional stormwater into the area where the graves lie, damaging them. Horry County building standards require new homes to be constructed above flood levels, meaning a number of properties on the fully-developed tract could force water downhill to the cemeteries, residents worry.
Part of that worry is due to how flat Horry County is, and how the water flows. Near the Burgess area, for example, the swamps, streams, Waccamaw River and Intracoastal Waterway all meet on their way to drain into the Winyah Bay. But that water can only drain during low tides, about two or three hours a day, meaning the area is full of swamps and wetlands. Burgess residents like Holmes worry that changing that balance could flood the cemeteries.
“I know we can’t stop the project, but they should come up with a plan that helps us,” Holmes said a community meeting in Burgess on Tuesday. “They need to do something not to help us, to protect us, to protect us from having more damage done to the cemetery.”
A grassroots effort begins
Because of those fears that the cemeteries, believed to hold former enslaved people as well as generations of Burgess residents, residents in Burgess began an effort last week to ensure the developers and county protect the grave sites.
With more than a dozen Burgess residents piled into golf carts, Holmes on Friday led a caravan of those concerned about the cemetery along the Blackmoor course to the 13th hole. Maps, displaying ground-penetrating-radar data, show three separate burial sites, all near one another, along the 13th fairway. Using those maps, Holmes pointed out various burials, noting that many are unmarked because families lacked money for headstones. Several graves, Holmes said, have stainless steel covers on them to protect them from the weather.
Once the residents arrived at the cemetery sites, they fanned out, looking for marked graves, and looking for clues that might point to unmarked burials. The radar data shows more than 100 burials between the three sites, though only about a dozen or so are marked. And of those, only a handful have headstones.
Accompanying Holmes and the other residents on Friday was Lou Conklin, a senior planner in the Horry County Planning & Zoning department who specializes in preserving graves and cemeteries. She said the developers of the 706-acre tract — near the corner of Salem Road and S.C. 707 — had found one recent burial on the site, but hadn’t yet identified any others. County planners occasionally use ground-penetrating radar detection to find graves, though such a survey hasn’t been done on the planned development site yet. Some Burgess residents worry that graves of formerly enslaved people could be on the site.
Conklin on Friday explained that while South Carolina state law forbids the destruction of a grave or cemetery, neither the state nor county has strict requirements for ensuring burials aren’t on a piece of land before new building occurs. Typically, she said, developers or county planners will conduct a review of historical records to check for cemeteries or burials that aren’t marked, but there aren’t specific search methods mandated in state or local law.
Just because destroying cemeteries is illegal, she said. “doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.”
“Developers will call us at times and they’ll say, ‘Listen, we know there’s a cemetery on there, do you know where it is? Can you mark it for us?’ And we’ve gone out and marked them and stuff like that,” Conklin said. “I will try to do anything I can to help people to save the cemeteries.”
Preserving Black history
At the Burgess community’s meeting Tuesday, Holmes pitched the idea of building a dike or a brim of some kind around the cemetery to keep the water out, though its not clear yet if the developers or county leaders will consider such an idea.
Still, Holmes and other members of the Burgess community insist that keeping the cemetery in tact is essential. Holmes even said he’d already seen part of it destroyed, when he worked for Grand Strand Water & Sewer. During one job, he said, when the Blackmoor course was first being developed, he remembered seeing machines dig up mounds of dirt that had tombstones strewn about within them. He made a call to the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, who paused the project, but the tombstones were ultimately lost.
Other residents, as they surveyed the cemetery, realized they had great-great grandparents or other relatives buried there. And for residents like Gerald Floyd, the cemetery offered a way to honor their ancestors. On Friday, she brought her 18-year-old grandson Cameron Davies along to see Days grave with her. Seeing the grave was so powerful, Gerald Floyd said, it felt surreal.
“(Seeing the grave) is good because I’ve worked years to get to this day. Now, to see the world really recognize the importance of (Gullah) culture is surreal,” Gerald Floyd, a professor emeritus of Coastal Carolina University, said. “It’s like I’m above it, watching.”
Davies could only come up with one word to describe seeing the grave: “Amazing,” he said. “It’s amazing.”
This story was originally published December 20, 2021 at 9:16 AM.
