A Brief History of the African American Burial Ground in Woodland Cemetery

June 14, 2023

By Dr. Rhondda Thomas, Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature, Call My Name Faculty Director, and Coordinator of Research and Community Engagement for the African American Burial Ground and Woodland Cemetery Historic Preservation Project

This post is re-published from the June 2023 newsletter. Download the full June 2023 newsletter

On March 11, 1946, among the five topics that members of Clemson College’s Buildings and Ground Committee discussed was “Markers for graves of convicts and slaves on Cemetery Hill.” According to committee member Mr. Newman, “it was his understanding that on Cemetery Hill are buried some 200 to 250 slaves and convicts.” After a discussion, the committee “unanimously voted to recommend that some type of permanent marker be established on Cemetery Hill to indicate this colored graveyard.” One day later David J. Watson, chair of the committee, advised Clemson President R. F. Poole and Business Manager John C. Littlejohn of the motion and recommended that “accurate information should be obtained and placed on the marker.”¹ Eleven years later, Watson sent a memo to Henry Hill, director of auxiliary enterprises at Clemson, for the “Clemson Cemetery.” Although they were mainly concerned about the maintenance of Woodland Cemetery, the following recommendation was also included: “Enclose area of colored graveyard within a securely constructed wire fence. There is a space approximately 100’ x 125’ about 400 feet west of Calhoun plot enclosure.”² Neither of the recommendations was enacted. Thus, Clemson missed the opportunity to memorialize and protect the African American Burial Ground. What follows is a brief overview of the history of this sacred site based on research we have conducted thus far.

The first burials of people of African descent on the land where the Fort Hill Plantation was established and later the Clemson Agricultural College of South Carolina was built likely occurred during the antebellum period. In 1801, Reverend James McElhenny, a Presbyterian minister for the Old Stone Church in Pendleton, SC, moved onto the land with his family. McElhenny owned 25 enslaved African Americans who likely built Clergy Hall, the four-room home where the minister and his extended family lived.³ Some of the enslaved persons who labored for the McElhenny family may have been buried on the site that would become known as Cemetery Hill.

After Rev. McElhenny died in 1812, Floride Bonneau Colhoun purchased the land. John C. Calhoun moved his family to the property in 1826. Enslaved carpenters added 10 rooms to the four-room Clergy Hall, and Calhoun renamed the property Fort Hill. The Calhouns along with Thomas Green Clemson owned over 100 enslaved persons who labored on their plantations and in John Calhoun’s mines in South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. To date, however, researchers have only been able to find documentation for one enslaved person, 74-year-old Thom, owned by Mrs. J.C. (Floride) Calhoun, who died in 1850 and was buried at Fort Hill.⁴ Although there are other death records for enslaved persons who labored at Fort Hill, their burial place is not noted in the documents. These include Nelly, owned by Floride Calhoun, who died in childbirth in 1856.⁵ Then at the end of the Civil War, 70 persons, mostly children, died of whooping cough and measles.⁶

However, there are several elderly enslaved persons listed in various records who are not included in the last inventory of enslaved persons at Fort Hill completed in 1865. For example, was 100-year-old Phebe was listed in the “Schedule of Slaves with the Names and Ages” in the deed for the sale of Fort Hill in 1854.⁷ Additionally, in 1849, Joseph Scoville reported meeting 112-year-old widow Monemi whose husband Polydore “had lived to a very old age.”⁸ Also, enslaved persons died in America at disproportionately higher rates during the antebellum period because of harsh living working conditions and the violence associated with slavery.

After the Civil War ended, African Americans continued living, working, and dying on the land where Clemson University was built through the mid-twentieth century. Recently emancipated African Americans were employed as sharecroppers, domestics, and tenant farmers at Fort Hill during Reconstruction. Clemson trustees leased mostly African American convicted laborers, ages 14-67, from the state penitentiary to build a school for young white men. Twelve African American convicted laborers died while building Clemson and are believed to have been buried on Cemetery Hill. Clemson administrators and faculty hired African American wage workers as cooks, barbers, farm hands, laundry workers, nurses, construction laborers, and domestics to provide much needed support services for the college. Initially, they lived near white employees on the main campus but were gradually pushed into segregated neighborhoods, including areas in and around the cemetery.

Shortly after Clemson sought and received permission in 1960 from the Oconee County Court to dissenter the remains of African Americans from the west side of the cemetery and reinter them on its south side. This order led Clemson to destroy the African American Burial Ground, utilizing the soil to build dikes around Lake Hartwell. As the soil was removed, however, the remains of what were believed to be several African American children were disturbed and then reburied on the south side of Woodland Cemetery.⁹

Until July 2020, Clemson had designated about a one-acre site on the south side of Woodland Cemetery as the “Fort Hill Slave and Convict Cemetery.” After then Clemson students Sarah Adams and Morgan Molosso discovered the neglect of the burial ground shortly after being encouraged to visit the site during a Call My Name campus tour in February 2020, they initiated a process that led to the hiring of a team that conducted Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) to detect the number of possible unmarked burials on the site.¹⁰ Researchers are currently analyzing the GPR data and historical records to ensure that all who are buried in Woodland Cemetery and the African American Burial Ground are respected and honored.

Citations

1. Minutes of the Building and Grounds Committee, March 11, 1946, Series 7, Box 1, Folder 6, Robert F. Poole Presidential Records, Committee Files, 1928-1955, Special Collections and Archives, Clemson University Libraries.
2. David J. Watson to Henry Hill, November 22, 1957, Mss 366, Box 2, Folder 17, Papers of Carrel Cowan-Ricks, Special Collections and Archives, Clemson University Libraries.
3. Third Census of the United States, Pendleton, South Carolina, 1810, Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, National Archives, Washington, D.C. Accessed through Ancestry.com.
4. Register of St. Paul’s, Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church Records, 1819-1971, South Carolina Digital Library Collections, https://scdl.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/spr/id/1367/rec/52, 307.
5. Register of St. Paul’s, 307.
6. Floride Clemson, A Rebel Came Home; the Diary of Floride Clemson Tells of Her Wartime Adventures in Yankeeland, 1863-64, Her Trip Home to South Carolina, ed. Charles M. McGee, Jr. and Ernest M. Lander, Jr. (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1961), 90-91.
7. Calhoun, Floride; Calhoun, Cornelia M.; and Calhoun, Andrew P., “Deed to Fort Hill plantation and enslaved persons between Floride Calhoun, Cornelia M. Calhoun and Andrew P. Calhoun, 1854 May 15” (1854). Thomas Green Clemson Papers, Mss 2. 210, https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1209&context=tgc.
8. Joseph Scoville, “A Visit to Fort Hill,” New York Herald, July 26, 1849, 1.
9. State of South Carolina, County of Oconee, Court of Common Pleas, Ex parte: The Clemson Agricultural College of South Carolina, In Re: The Purported Cemetery of Unknown Deceased Persons, Petition, 22 August 1960, and Order, 3 September 1960, Mss 366, Box 2, Folder 17, Papers of Carrel Cowan-Ricks, Special Collections and Archives, Clemson University Libraries; Carrel Cowan-Ricks, Note to File, September 18, 1991, Mss 366, Box 2, Folder 17, Papers of Carrel Cowan-Ricks; Carrel Cowan-Ricks, Report of Interview with Robert E. Ware, July 17, 1992, in Series 613, Site History, 1895-2008, The Woodland Cemetery Stewardship Committee Records, https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1012&context=woodland, all in Special Collections and Archives, Clemson University Libraries.
10. Zoe Nicholson, “Clemson students to honor unmarked burial ground for slaves, convict laborers on campus,” Greenville News, March 26, 2020.