In the flat, open lot of Sandfield Cemetery, roughly 14 grassy acres are dotted with disjointed headstones – many broken or tilted – while an unknown number of other graves remain unmarked.
Now, the city is trying to bring those unknown burials into view, using community research and radar-sensing technology to better understand how many people are actually buried there.
“The city … wants to … even if we can’t identify everybody that’s here, find people that know what the history looks like,” Rogena Bonner, cemetery director for the city, told The Dispatch on Thursday. “That’s the most important thing, and for those bodies … we can identify in the ground, (we can) put some markers out. It’s just us saying ‘We know that you’re there.’ … Regardless of they’re white or if they’re Black, the dead need to be identified.’”
Sandfield Cemetery is the oldest African American cemetery in Columbus, with the first burial there in 1820, according to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. The cemetery, which contains roughly 250 known graves, was declared abandoned in 1992 and designated a state landmark in 2004.
There is no complete record of who is buried there, Bonner said. She and Susan Wilder, the city’s grant writer, hope to partner with Mississippi State University’s anthropology department to map graves using radar technology.
At the site Thursday, MSU graduate student Morgan Scallorn explained two methods for doing that: ground-penetrating radar, which detects underground disturbances; and magnetometer surveys, which measure changes in the earth’s magnetic field.
While both can help locate unmarked graves, Scallorn said magnetometer surveys have limits. They cannot determine if graves overlap or detect burials without a coffin or casket.
Wilder hopes the work can be completed as a class project, though she also plans to pursue a Mellon Foundation grant to fund the efforts.
If approved, Wilder said the grant could also support restoring headstones and returning the cemetery closer to its original plans, proposed in 1854, which included a wrought-iron fence and a central gazebo.
Beyond simply mapping graves, Wilder and Bonner want to ensure each burial is acknowledged.
“This is just going to be one of those projects where I think we’ll take as much time as we need … to do it right,” Wilder said. “I want to meet with all of these Black churches. I want to know what records they have. … And as we gather the information, we need to look at the headstones that are here … and we need to do due diligence before we mess with their headstones (for repairs), and talk to the families.”
That work is already underway. Susie Shelton, a member of the Preservation Society of Columbus, is searching for descendants and piecing together burial records through oral histories.
“I’ve been trying to get a lot of information and do a lot of research on this area because … there’s not a lot of records,” Shelton told The Dispatch. “I have to go and talk to people in the neighborhoods, the older people first, and then I have to go around to the different churches and talk to different people in there.”
Among those buried at Sandfield are Robert Gleed, a formerly enslaved man who became a state senator; W. I. Mitchell, the first Black principal of Union Academy School; and Simon Mitchell, a Reconstruction-era justice of the peace.
“Our youths don’t know,” Shelton said. “They need to know the past. They need to know that we have great examples. These people … are great examples for them. It’s just very important .. for the community and it’s especially for our young people.”
Shelton said obituaries could provide additional information on identifying unmarked burials, though they are difficult to find. Many Black residents’ obituaries were not published in white-owned newspapers until the mid-20th century.
Those obituaries, Wilder said, may instead be preserved in Black churches and archives of Black-owned newspapers.
Shelton said anyone with information about those buried at Sandfield can contact her at [email protected].
Bonner said she hopes similar research can eventually be done at Friendship Cemetery, a larger, predominately white burial ground dating back to 1849, which she said is full of “unanswered questions.”
“We have unmarked graves … some graves that are marked (as) city of Columbus,” she said. “What does that mean? … How many graves are there?”
Bonner does not have a timeline in mind for when efforts to use radar sensing at Friendship could begin.
The Preservation Society of Columbus also hopes to compile a master plan for other historically Black cemeteries in Lowndes County to continue similar research.
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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 39 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
