YORK, S.C. — For the first time, a ceremony was held at Historic Brattonsville in York County to honor the lives of the enslaved people buried in mostly unmarked graves at the site.
Initially, only 46 graves were identified at the site, but help from archaeology officials from the University of South Carolina recently helped find hundreds more.
“By the time we finished, we had identified 481 probable graves out here in the cemetery and no one had any idea there was anything like that out here,” said Carey Tilley, Director of Historic Properties at the Cultural and Heritage Museums.
A $40,000 grant was used to purchase headstones and clean up the burial site, now called the Enslaved Ancestral Burial Ground.
The ceremony and restoration efforts have brought long-awaited recognition and respect to the enslaved individuals buried there, fulfilling a dream for descendants like Wali Cathcart.
Cathcart’s great-grandmother Lila Crawford was a slave on the Brattonsville Plantation in McConnells until she was freed around 1865 when she was 23 years old.
His grandmother Fannie and her siblings were born in McConnells and eventually moved away, but other slaves never saw freedom and died on the plantation where they were buried here with no headstones.
“I guess it was more than a dream,” Cathcart said.” It was something I thought about a lot, and I wanted to see them honored more.
“It’s like they were desecrated in life and in death,” he said. “Just thrown away to the wilderness and I think that was not the proper respect I wanted to see for my ancestors.”
Cathcart is happy his relatives are finally being recognized.
“These are our ancestors. I was excited. I still am,” he said.
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