ground-penetrating radar

Lane Street Project: seek and ye shall find.

Drought has seized Wilson County, leaving wild grasses brown and brittle.

… and revealing the stark truth of Vick Cemetery.

George Freeney Jr. launched a drone over Vick recently, thinking to snag a few images as mementoes of his time in Wilson. What he captured stopped my heart.

Those little lozenges where the grass is growing greener and lusher? These are the ancestors revealed in plain sight. These are the graves of our people.

Last month, when I spoke at a Wilson City Council meeting to give thanks to all who made radar survey of Vick Cemetery possible, I stated as one reason the work is important is that the dead cannot speak.

I was wrong.

Row after row. Side by side. Despite decades in which its stewards allowed a forest to spring up over it, and tires to pile high in its weeds, and power poles to punch through its sacred soil, and its headstones to be ripped up and cast away,  Vick Cemetery’s dead — my father’s baby brother, my cousins, your grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts and uncles — are speaking loudly and clearly: WE ARE NOT LOST. WE ARE HERE.

Last month, I also placed signs in Vick Cemetery reading “1000s of graves lie here.”

That time I was right.

We rejoice, we give thanks, we renew our vows to restore recognition and dignity to our dead.

The prayers of the righteous availeth much.

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Radar locates ‘thousands of graves’: scan pinpoints Vick Cemetery’s lost burial sites

by Drew C. Wilson, Wilson Times, 7 July 2022

Researchers who spent two weeks using ground-penetrating radar to examine Vick Cemetery said Thursday that the graveyard is “quite dense” and “a well-populated cemetery.”

Jordan Cole, an assistant geophysics specialist with Greensboro-based New South Associates, supervised a radar survey of more than 7 acres of land off Bishop L.N. Forbes Street from June 20-30.

“It is what we expected, there are thousands of graves there,” Cole said. “It looks really quite dense like a well-populated cemetery, you might say.”

Cole said the actual number of graves has not been calculated from the 13 grids into which the site was divided.

“In our process, when Jordan was out in the field, he collected thousands of transects out in the field,” said Sarah Lowry, director of geophysics at New South Associates. “They take those all in and eventually stack them all together to create three-dimensional blocks of data. We put those all together and create a three-dimensional block of changes below the ground.”

Lowry said analysis of the 3D blocks “is the tedious part.”

“Jordan is about to embark upon that stage of data processing and interpretation, so that is the stage that he is in,” Lowry said. “This is where the real information comes from. He is going to go through every single two-dimensional transect and all of those three-dimensional data blocks and map out each individual possible burial in the ground.”

Cole said that in addition to individual graves, the GPR data, which looks at changes in soil densities, was able to detect other features that could aid research into the arrangement of the graveyard.

“We were able to discern some little land features like there might be a couple of roads or pathways that we can try to map and figure out the layout of the cemetery in a little more detail,” Cole said.

Lowry said it is the careful, methodical data analysis that will assist in finding the site’s older graves.

“Those hard-to-detect ones are going to be people who were buried in more ephemeral burial containers or the older graves or maybe children or infants in smaller graves,” she said. “Those are harder to map.”

‘SACRED GROUND’

Last week, photographer George Freeney flew his drone over Vick Cemetery and immediately recognized a series of rectangles in the first photograph he captured.

Freeney recognized the repetitive rectangles as soon as he saw the photograph.

“It was completely obvious,” said Freeney, who has relatives in the graveyard. “I know that I have people out here. I know they are at rest. They are at rest. We just don’t know who they are.”

Cole said especially on the western side of the cemetery, there seemed to be a lot of visible graves that were “right there in front of us.”

“When we showed up on the first day, they had recently mowed. We were there for two weeks and by the end of the two weeks, you could see taller and lusher grass growing where the graves were,” Cole said. “When it became a little more overgrown, it was even clearer to see those graves.”

“As African Americans, we are looking for relics. We are looking for things that we can hold onto to build our heritage because we just don’t know,” Freeney said. “This is absolutely sacred ground.”

Cole said he will spend the next two weeks looking through the data.

“It will be a couple of months until we have a complete report,” Lowry said. “That report will include all of our methods as well as a lot of maps showing where we did find graves, the numbers and depth estimates for the graves.”

“It is just a lot of grinding work  to sort it through,” Cole said.

The only place not scanned with ground-penetrating radar was a large area of vegetation around the monument the city installed in May 1996.

The city of Wilson spent nearly $29,159 to undertake the GPR work.

The city has owned Vick Cemetery since 1913. In 1990, the city razed the cemetery’s grave markers and removed debris. In doing so, much of the history of Wilson’s African American residents were lost. 

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For more about Lane Street Project’s efforts at Vick Cemetery, start here — note especially the survey map included in the post — and search this blog for more.

Photos courtesy of George E. Freeney Jr., all rights reserved.

Lane Street Project: radar project begins.

Radar project begins at Vick Cemetery

By Drew C. Wilson, Wilson Times, 22 June 2022.

It took only a few minutes Monday afternoon for ground-penetrating radar operators to detect graves at Vick Cemetery.

The two-man crew from Greensboro-based New South Associates will work at the African American cemetery for two weeks in an effort to pinpoint every burial site.

The 7.84-acre, city-owned graveyard off Bishop L.N. Forbes Street was cleared of all its trees and grave markers in the mid-1990s after an extended period of neglect, but the effort to clean up the cemetery resulted in the destruction of a considerable amount of history for the African American community in Wilson.

“We just finished our first grid of ground-penetrating radar, and immediately we were seeing radar reflections that are indicative of graves,” said assistant geophysics specialist Jordan Cole. “It is hard to tell exactly how many, but it looks fairly densely packed from what I have seen already. We did a grid that was 14 meters by 16 meters, and in each profile, we are seeing evidence for six to 10 graves.”

Wilson historian Lisa Y. Henderson, a former resident of Wilson who now lives in Atlanta, called the city’s use of ground-penetrating radar “a huge step” in many ways.

“First, it is the first affirmative action by the city in several decades to claim its ownership of Vick Cemetery,” Henderson said. “The things that were done at Vick in the past, which were well intended but had pretty devastating consequences, can’t be corrected, but it is vital for us to have a sense of how many people are buried there.”

Right now, people who drive past Vick Cemetery just see a big, empty field.

“If we aren’t able to even tell people how many people are buried there and where they are buried, it is difficult for Vick to regain its place in people’s consciousness as a sacred place,” Henderson said.

In the mid-1990s, she said, a visual survey located about 1,500 graves.

“But given the period of time that Vick was active, which was roughly 1913 when the city acquired it until the 1950s, that’s 40 years, and there would have been at least 100 burials a year, probably more for much of that period,” Henderson said.

She said records are difficult to decipher because Vick Cemetery and the adjacent Rountree and Odd Fellows cemeteries were collectively called Rountree.

“So it kind of obscures where the actual burials were, but the aerial imagery that we are lucky enough to have from the ‘30s and ‘40s shows that it was an active cemetery, a full cemetery, a place that was an important institution in our community,” Henderson said.

HOW IT WORKS

Cole and archaeologist Chris Triplett of Farmville set up a grid system across the property and began a systematic scan of the whole area.

“GPR works by telling the difference between dense soil and less dense soil,” Cole explained. “Wherever there is a contrast between the density of the soil, the GPR will pick that up. So we will see regular disturbance, but we should also be able to see graves as long as the cut from the grade is still preserved from the disturbance that is higher up.”

The system is able to see close to 3 to 4 meters (9.8 to 13.1 feet) deep.

“It’s the same concept as regular radar that you might use to watch and track air traffic,” Cole said. “It focuses its energy and looks straight down at the ground. It will send out an electromagnetic pulse into the ground. The pulse will hit something, and then the pulse will return back to the antennae and the machine records the time that it takes to leave the machine, hit something, which in this case is a change in density of soil, and return. By telling how quickly that travel time is — it is called travel time — we will know how far away it is from the antennae, which translates into how deep it is below the soil.”

GPR works by collecting a series of parallel lines of data.

“We space them at half a meter between each line,” Cole said. “When we are collecting data in the field, we can only see that individual line that we are collecting at that time in the field. Then when we go and process it with the computer, we can line up every profile side by side and use a computer to interpolate that data and produce a bird’s eye view of the reflections in the ground, and that will show us the graves in the ground and how big they are.

“Once the crew takes the data back to the office to start processing it, they will be able to produce a map that shows wherever there is ground disturbance across the whole area, and we can map the size of those disturbances and mark which ones are graves. Hopefully we can produce a pretty accurate map of where every grave is across the whole zone.”

The city is paying $29,159 for the company to conduct the work.

WHO IS BURIED THERE?

“The way a community treats its dead says something about that community,” Henderson said.

“I think it’s past time that Wilson demonstrates is commitment to all of its citizens, past and present, and honors the lives of the folks that are buried in Vick, probably most of whom were working-class people, tobacco factory workers, agricultural laborers and domestic workers,” she said. “They are the people who built east Wilson. They are the people who worked in the homes and the businesses downtown and in west Wilson and eased the lives of what might have been called the city’s leading citizens, so in that way they played a role too in the development of what we now know as Wilson.”

Henderson said she is excited about the project.

“I am looking so forward to seeing the report that results from it,” she said. “I have seen some reports for ground-penetrating radar, but on a much smaller scale. So it will really be exciting to see what evidence is left.”

Henderson has provided the company with documents to compare to its findings.

“We appreciate the opportunity to assist the city in mapping the landscape of the Vick Cemetery so that all who lie there can be recognized and remembered,” she said.

Castonoble Hooks, a member of the Wilson Cemetery Commission, said he is delighted that the project has started.

“It is not too late for them to begin to rectify the wrongs that they have done,” Hooks said. “Omitting these people for so very long, I hope that this is a sea change as far as the direction that the city has in public cemeteries and its treatment toward Blacks.”

For more photos and to support local media, please visit this article at Wilson Times online.

Lane Street Project: a step forward.

Vick Cemetery in the gloaming, June 2022.

Last night at Wilson City Council meeting:

“Good evening. I am Lisa Y. Henderson of Atlanta, Georgia, and Bel Air Avenue, Wilson. I am curator of the blog Black Wide-Awake and founder of Lane Street Project.

“I am not in Wilson as often as I would like to be, but was excited to learn when I got home today that ground-penetrating radar is slated to start Monday at city-owned Vick Cemetery. It is a fitting undertaking for the day after Juneteenth and an important step to restoring dignity to our community’s dead. Though we will never know exactly who is buried in Vick, we can know more about the number of people buried there and where their bodies lie.

“I and, I’d wager, every African-American in this room have family in Vick Cemetery, and the city’s recognition of its responsibility to this sacred space is welcome. I thank Mayor Stephens, members of council, the city manager, and any and all city employees who have or will have a hand in this important endeavor. The dead cannot speak, but this survey will help voice their stories. Again, thank you.”

Lane Street Project: In anticipation of GPR at Vick Cemetery.

I’m still awaiting official confirmation of details, but I have been notified that Wilson City Council approved funds for a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey of Vick Cemetery. While this survey won’t identify by name the thousands buried there, it is a step in the right direction and should give us a good idea of the locations of the cemetery’s graves and a closer count of their number.

During the period that GPR for Vick was under discussion, I learned that a city department recently spent five thousand dollars for a GPR survey of a tiny parcel of land downtown that was the family cemetery of one of the earliest white families to settle in what is now Wilson. I was interested in how the city came to spend five thousand dollars of public money on a quarter-acre private graveyard, given its howls and cries about even mowing the grass at Odd Fellows and its side-eyeing of the thirty-thousand dollar cost set out in the initial bid for GPR at Vick — which, at almost eight acres, is more than 30 times larger than the Old Farmer Cemetery and is city-owned property.

So I made a Public Records Act request. I received a prompt response and share some excerpts here with you (as well as the receipt).

The GPR report, prepared in September 2021 for Wilson’s Planning and Revitalization Department, offers exciting glimpses into what we might find at Vick.