DANVILLE, Va. — A decision to move the remains of hundreds African American tenant farmers from a former Virginia tobacco plantation to a dedicated burial ground has elicited a range of emotions among the sharecroppers’ descendants.
Some worry about the implications of disturbing the graves of people who were exploited and enslaved. Others hope the remains can be identified and reburied with more respect than they were afforded in life.
The mostly unidentified remains are being moved from a site that had been part of one of the nation’s largest slave-owning operations, to make way for an industrial park.
When they were buried they weren’t considered fully human, but now they are “patriots who are coming out of their graves with equal rights in 2025,” one descendant, Cedric Hairston, said.
Archaeologists have already started exhuming the approximately 275 plots, and some of the remains of tenant farmers and their families are already in a funeral home but will be moved to the new burial site about a mile away. Officials have been consulting with descendants about genetic testing on unidentified remains as well as designs for the new cemetery, including a memorial archway.
“I don’t think anybody would want their ancestors exhumed or moved,” said Jeff Bennett, whose great-great-great grandfather was buried at the plantation. “But for them to give us a lot of say so in the new cemetery, down to the design details and the plaques and memorials that we put up, I feel like (they’re) really doing it in a dignified way, in a respectful way.”
African American cemeteries have suffered neglect, abandonment and destruction over the centuries. But efforts to preserve them are gaining momentum, with communities unearthingand rebuilding these crucial links to past generations.
While generally supportive of the project to move the graves, Hairston worries about the indignity of exhuming the graves of people who were brutalized as slaves and exploited as sharecroppers.
“It just seems that 100 or so odd years after their death, there’s still no rest,” he said.
Oak Hill was part of a family empire that enslaved thousands of people across 45 plantations and farms in four states, according to “The Hairstons,” a 1999 book by Henry Wiencek that chronicles the Black and white Hairston families.
Samuel Hairston, the plantation’s owner, was reputedly the largest enslaver in the South, Wiencek wrote.
But the grand property has stood mostly empty and unused since sharecropping ended last century. The 1820s plantation house was destroyed by fire in 1988.
Many who were enslaved at Oak Hill left after emancipation, Wiencek wrote. Those who remained as tenant farmers were often cheated of wages and faced crushing poverty and sometimes violence in the Jim Crow South.
Some tenant farmers took the Hairston surname, in part because “we had no other name to identify with, as the government was collecting data for the census. We brought no last name with us from Africa,” Cedric Hairston said, adding, “Many of our women carried and birthed a Hairston child, never with the support of the law to report that they were raped.”
One of the sharecroppers was Fleming Adams Sr., Bennett’s great-great-great grandfather. Known as “Flem,” he was born into slavery on another plantation in 1830. He later worked at Oak Hill, where he had to duck through doorways because he was so tall, Bennett said.
Adams and his wife Martha raised three sons — George, Daniel and Flem Jr. — before he died in 1916. His death certificate lists his burial place as Oak Hill.
“My hope is that we can discover where Flem is,” Bennett said. “He was 7 feet tall, so they’d be looking for a bigger coffin. And hopefully there’d be enough of his remains where they could do a DNA sample.”
Most of the graves in the two secluded sharecropper cemeteries were marked only by moss-covered stones without inscriptions. Rows of depressions in the earth showed where the wooden coffins had collapsed below. Needles from loblolly pines covered many of the plots.
A public entity, the Pittsylvania-Danville Regional Industrial Facility Authority, acquired 3,500 acres (1,400 hectares) of land that included the former Oak Hill plantation, and Tennessee-based Microporous announced in November it would build a $1.3 billion battery production facility there. It expects to create 2,000 jobs.
Virginia’s Department of Historical Resources granted a permit in late November to move the graves, noting that relocation is consistent with the desires of the descendant families. Bennett and others visited the sites in December.
Silence fell as they walked into the first cemetery. J.D. Adams, an Oak Hill descendant, said a historical marker must be placed there.
“We need some time in order to determine what it is we want and how we want it,” Adams told Matt Rowe, Pittsylvania County’s economic development director.
Rowe replied: “I’m open to anything and everything.”
The industrial authority has raised $1.3 million from logging the land to fund the project, which is being handled by engineering and consulting company WSP.
WSP’s archaeologist, John Bedell, said everything would be collected from each grave shaft, even if it is mostly soil, and transferred to its new space, including the stone that marked it.
The firm hopes to finish transferring the graves by early March. Work on the new burial site and a dedication ceremony will follow in the coming months.
Bennett and others recently viewed personal items found in the graves. Protected in plastic bags, they included eyeglasses, a medicine bottle and a 5-cent coin from 1836. One man was buried with a light bulb, socket and electrical cord. Another man’s grave was lined with bricks, indicating he was wealthy, Bennet said.
Those bricks will be repurposed at the new burial site, possibly in the memorial archway, and inscribed with the names of the deceased, he said.
Descendants are reviewing funeral home records to try to identify those buried in unmarked graves. Given the challenging nature of the task, they may inscribe the names of everyone who lived in the area.
“I feel like we’re reemphasizing the significance of our ancestors,” Bennett said. “It’s been generations since people used that area to bury people. And now we’re rediscovering their stories. And hopefully we can continue to tell those stories to the next generations.”
