September 2007

Unearthing the Past: GW Students Help Preserve Freedman’s Cemetery in Alexandria, Va.

By Adela de la Torre

This summer, 20 GW students enrolled in Anthropology 113 traded in notebooks and pencils for brushes, hammers, and hiking boots to help examine and restore a long-neglected historical site: the Freedman’s Cemetery in Alexandria, Va. Led by Pamela Cressey, adjunct associate professor of anthropology and American studies at GW and city archaeologist of Alexandria, the students located grave sites, chronicled their findings, and prepared a public tour for 50 visitors at the end of their program.

Cressey says the intensive 10-day program, an annual summer field school located at historical sites in Alexandria, turned students into mini-experts. “Within two weeks, the students learned how to excavate, process what they’ve found, and could turn around and be interpreters them­selves,” she says.

Approximately 1,800 African Americans were buried in the cemetery, many of whom came to Union-occupied Alexandria fleeing slavery during the height of the Civil War. Due to the lack of food and shelter, deaths were rampant, leading the federal government to order the creation of Freedman’s Cemetery in 1864.

The cemetery was all but forgotten by the mid-20th century. In 1955, a gas station was built on the site, and, six years later, an office building and major roadway were erected on portions of the land. It wasn’t until 1997 that a serious preservation effort began, spearheaded by Lillie Finklea, an Alexandria resident who formed a group called Friends of Freedman’s Cemetery.

Cressey says grave identifications will be complete by the end of the year, and a commemorative park, the Alexandria Freedman’s Cemetery Memorial Park, will be built by 2010. There will be a competition for park designs, which will include all the names of the African Americans buried in the cemetery.

Bridgitte Rodguez, a master’s student in GW’s Department of Anthropology and participant in the class, says the students worked in measured plots in trenches four feet deep in the ground. Rodguez says the students looked for soil changes that would indicate a coffin had been buried—“a very slow and meth­odical process.” Once a burial site was found, the location was noted on a map and marked with string. Rodguez says the site also contains evidence of Native American inhabitants, including quartz flakes from stone tools. “The cemetery has been through so much,” Rodguez says. “It was nice to have the opportunity to be a part of something that makes it into a place of respect again.”

“If you can keep archaeology sites in the ground, you can preserve history for all time,” says Cressey. “We can use this site as a landmark and a place of meaning for the future. By doing historical research and archaeology, these people’s stories and their names will live on.”

Send feedback to: bygeorge@gwu.edu