Old Plateau Cemetery
Every Black cemetery holds a very special place in the heart of its community, serving as a site of prayer, remembrance, and history. We have the special honor (and responsibility) that Africatown’s cemetery is the resting place of our African ancestors.
Old Plateau was established in 1876 — about a decade after the community first formed here. It guards the remains of our residents across 136 years.
In 2010, archaeologists from the College of William and Mary excavated the area with ground-penetrating radar and located over 3,000 unmarked graves in the older half of the grounds. This cemetery hold the remains of Cudjoe Lewis and the 109 other freed people who the Clotilda had stolen from Africa.
Past and present contamination, however, threatens the long-term preservation of the Africatown Cemetery. It was common in the post-Civil War/Reconstruction era to use arsenic in the embalming process, so modern-day flooding and erosion carries the risk of leaching that toxic chemical. Furthermore, all of the industrial sites you see neighboring our community? They continue to pump pollutants into our historic land.
