When University of Southern Alabama student Tia Jordan was researching a historic Black cemetery in Mobile earlier this year, she wanted to find more to continue her work.
After hearing about Mississippi State University’s Brush Arbor Cemetery Project, aimed at researching, cataloging and preserving the cemetery which sits on the north side of University Drive, she found what she was looking for.
Jordan joined eight other students from around the country to participate in the project’s first cohort and presented their findings about Brush Arbor Sunday at the Oktibbeha County Heritage Museum to about 40 attendees.
“The stuff that I found about how Black cemeteries were being abandoned and how even some were just being built over, it broke my heart to know that that was happening because people look like me,” Jordan said. “I wanted to actually be a part of the process of preserving one of the cemeteries.”
The Brush Arbor Cemetery project was started earlier this year by assistant professor of anthropology Jordan Lynton Cox and three other faculty to study the land and eventually build a digital database detailing the people buried at the site, its history and modern-day descendants.
Brush Arbor, formerly known as Starkville Colored Cemetery, is a historic landmark, with the oldest burial marker dating back to the death of Jimmie Cooper in 1882. According to a historic marker at the site, he was just 15 years old when he passed and is buried beside his parents who died after him. The most recent recorded burial was for Frances Winston in 1954.
Cox said the research conducted this summer identified about 81 burials and only 41 headstones while also discovering three previously unknown people buried at the two-acre cemetery: N. B. and Annie Bell and John Love.
Chuck Yarborough, a U.S. history teacher at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science, told The Dispatch historic Black cemeteries often have more burials than headstones, and that the existence of a headstone was largely dependent upon the wealth of the deceased’s family.
“I’m astounded by the progress that the students have been able to make in the past month,” Cox said. “They have been tirelessly looking into this history and taken it upon themselves to honor these people.”
Cox and her students also learned several white farmers and slave owners first owned the cemetery in the 1840s before being sold to the African American Methodist Episcopal Church in 1908. The land was later obtained by Billy and Judy Davis in 1989 and then again in 2012 by the City of Starkville when it declared the cemetery abandoned.
The cemetery was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2014, and after a community push, was added to several map apps in 2020.
Another student, Daniel Scheiner, said he and a few other students marked where exactly the headstones were and identified the additional burial sites using ground penetrating radar, oral histories and geographic information systems analysis. Other markings such as bricks, small stones and metal stakes were also found to be indicative of a grave, Scheiner said.
“We had to do a lot of land surveying and plotting for that,” he said. “I remember first seeing the cemetery; it felt very reverential at this place. I learned a lot of practices about how pretty much restorative architecture or restorative archaeology, and just being able to try to pick up the pieces for this project.”
Cox said the research conducted this past month will now act as a strong foundation for further analysis of the cemetery. She hopes to continue finding more burials and headstones and to turn those findings into an online database in two years.
She added once the project is complete and the database goes online, she and her team hope to identify a third-party organization to take ownership of the cemetery and upkeep it.
“It’s an amazing structure for us to build on,” Cox said. “What we’d like to do in the future is build that digital archive to host all of this information so that people can look into it and learn more about it by going on to a website. We would love for there to be future friends of the cemetery organization that can help to steward the cemetery in the future, but also apply for grants and to partner with other preservation organizations like the Black Cemetery Network.”
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 24 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
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