Clemson University in South Carolina has discovered more than 600 unmarked graves on campus. They most likely belong to slaves.
The 604 graves date back more than 200 years and the university is working to identify them.
A public, land-grant research university, Clemson was founded in 1889 and is the second-largest university in student population in South Carolina. Land-grant universities are established as a result of a gift or “grant” of land or cash from the federal government to the states where they are located.
The university was conducting ground-penetrating radar testing of the Woodland Cemetery located on its campus when unmarked graves were discovered, according to the university’s website.
Radar in late July initially revealed more than 200 unmarked graves and subsequent testing showed additional gravesites.
The graves most likely belonged to enslaved peoples, domestic workers, sharecroppers, and convict laborers who lived, worked, and died on the university’s land in the 1800s, Greenville News reported.
Ground-penetrating radar expert Lawrence Conyers, a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Denver, reviewed the methodologies of the team hired by Clemson to do the survey work and agreed with their interpretations that the graves most likely belonged to Black people.
“Long before a university or a college campus community, this place was an African-American community,” Clemson Historian Paul Anderson told the Greenville News.
“Until 1924, this was an African-American Cemetery,” former Clemson trustee Jim Bostic said. Then it became the cemetery for Clemson trustees, presidents and faculty.
Woodland Cemetery on the Clemson campus also has graves for members of the Calhoun family. John C. Calhoun founded the Fort Hill Plantation before the property was turned over to the state of South Carolina to become Clemson University. The plantation was in the Calhoun family from 1830 to 1865.
Prior to Calhoun, Rev. James McElhaney owned the plantation and owned at least 25 slaves.
Researchers recently opened the grounds for tours to more than 100 people including local families who believed their ancestors’ remains were those in the unmarked graves, Yahoo reported.
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Dr. Rhondda Thomas, the Calhoun Lemon Professor of History at Clemson, is working with the community to trace the unidentified graves to their descendants.
Researchers are uncovering graves of slaves as well as Black Americans who were victims of racial violence in other places around the U.S. In 2019, researchers uncovered mass graves from the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
