White flag with a gold ribbon denoting an unmarked grave in Woodland Cemetery.
The Woodland Cemetery and African American Burial Ground Historic Preservation Project seeks to tell the stories of the known and previously unknown burials located in Woodland Cemetery on the Clemson University campus. Through research and community engagement we intend to uncover as much as we can about this historic space and to properly commemorate all who are buried here. Monthly updates on research and community engagement, as well as the Cemetery History Series, are featured in our Project Newsletter.
Dr. Mandi Barnard is researching Andrew Pickens “A.P.” Calhoun using his manuscript collections from the South Caroliniana Archive and speeches he gave at commercial and agricultural society meetings in the 1850s. She is also working with an Alabama genealogist to track down deeds of sale for A.P.’s plantations there.
Dr. Sara Collini is working on the visual history of the cemetery with our undergraduate research assistants, Nolly Swan and Lucas DeBenedetti. We are using maps and photographs of the cemetery and surrounding landscape to show the history of the area and how it has changed from the 1700s to the present day. The visual history features several “Before and After” photographs at pivotal moments in the cemetery’s history, as well as interactive maps and image galleries. The visual history will be made available to the public along with our website re-design later in 2022.
(L) 1956 Aerial Photograph of Clemson Campus (R) 1963 Aerial Photograph of Clemson Campus | Clemson University Facilities
Marissa Davis, the Graduate Research Assistant for the project, is continuing her search for how those enslaved at Fort Hill gained access to the house. She wants to find out the original layout of the property. To do so, she will visit the Deeds Offices in Anderson, Oconee, and Pickens counties to search for the bill of sale between the Calhouns and the McElhennys. This document details the ownership changes for Clergy Hall, which was what the house was known as before it became Fort Hill. Other members of the team plan to go with her to the offices as their projects also are impacted by what might be found in the bill of sale.
Dr. Rhondda Thomas has been finalizing the application for the team’s oral history project with Clemson’s Institutional Review Board, meeting with the project’s preservation plan subcommitee as we move into the next phase of the cemetery project, and encouraging research collaborations between Clemson professors and community partners, including research for the African American local historical site database project that will include the African American Burial Ground in Woodland Cemetery. She also coordinated the development of the theme and format for the second annual research symposium to be held October 24-25 in the Hendrix Center at Clemson.
Dr. Brian Stack been volunteering with several organizations in the Upstate to promote Black history and the cemetery project. He volunteered at the 2022 Men of Color Summit in Greenville, South Carolina, is helping the city of Clemson plan its Juneteenth celebration, and has been attending events for “Save the Alley,” a grassroots effort to prevent the displacement of an African American community in Central, South Carolina.
A group on campus takes a tour of the African American Burial Ground and Woodland Cemetery.
The project team has also been continuing to give cemetery tours, which will run until mid-May. This semester we have had over 500 people attend tours and learn about the space. The tour was recently revamped to include new information discovered in the last year of research for this project. If you have not yet taken a cemetery tour, or if it has been a long time since you took one, please consider joining us.
We have also been training additional cemetery tour guides. We would welcome more members of the community to help us give tours. You can sign up to become a tour guide using this application.
A group walks to the Calhoun Family Plot on the tour of the African American Burial Ground and Woodland Cemetery.
Our undergraduate community engagement assistant, Aundrea Gibbons, has been expanding the reach of our Instagram account. She also created a story about Dr. Ayana Flewellen that will soon be featured on our Instagram. Dr. Flewellen gave the keynote lecture on Carrel Cowan-Ricks Recognition Day.
Dr. Rhondda Thomas joined Trustee David Dukes and Sally Mauldin in conducting informational sessions via Zoom about the cemetery for Clemson employees and retirees. She and Angela Agard, director of the Clemson Area African American Museum, are developing a presentation titled “Uncovering, Preserving, Sharing and Celebrating local African American History” for the International Town and Gown Conference that will be held at Clemson University on June 7-9, 2022. Their presentation will explore how to recover, preserve, and tell stories about the many contributions of African Americans in building Clemson University and local communities, including those who are believed to be buried in unmarked graves in the African American Burial Ground in Woodland Cemetery. More information about the conference can be found here.
Download the full July 2022 Newsletter Research Update Dr. Mandi Barnard has been coordinating the Cemetery Team’s archival research objectives […]
By Dr. Rhondda Thomas, Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature, Call My Name Faculty Director, and Coordinator of Research and Community […]
This is a special post re-published from the April 2023 newsletter. Read the full April 2023 newsletter. By Lucas DeBenedetti, […]