By Sue Anne Pressley Montes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 3, 2006; B01
Someone loved them once, enough to mark their graves with painted boards and oyster shells. A whitewashed fence enclosed the graveyard, and the families who belonged to the Colored Union Benevolent Association in 1870 no doubt took pride in knowing they had secured something society often denied them: a dignified resting place all their own.
But as time passed, the peace of the property on Adams Mill Road NW was disturbed repeatedly. An unknown number of graves were removed as various projects chipped at the site. Roads were widened, and buildings sprang up nearby. In the 1970s, a city park was constructed on part of the land, and the bustling Adams Morgan neighborhood around it seemed to forget that the cemetery had ever existed.
Last year, when neighbors began finding pieces of human bone poking through the earth at Walter C. Pierce Community Park, the past came flying back to be dealt with and reconciled. The D.C. government halted a soil-erosion project at the park, and a Howard University team will begin surveying the area this month to find out what needs to be done to protect any remaining graves.
"It's a health issue, but you can also look at it as a spiritual issue," said Mark E. Mack, a biological anthropologist at Howard who is leading the study. He said he would not consider closing the park or removing any remains but probably would recommend that eroded areas be filled.
Historians also hope to find a way to memorialize the people, many of whom had just emerged from slavery and worked as barbers, drivers and laborers in late 19th-century Washington. In their efforts to build some sense of community by honoring their dead, they shed light on a poignant time in African American history.
"Because I know the history of the place, I had a responsibility as a human being to see they took proper care," said Mary Belcher, a neighborhood resident and history buff who has long lobbied on behalf of the cemetery. "We want to revive the understanding that there are people buried there."
Untold numbers have lived and died on Earth, and it is inevitable that one man's grave can become, over time, another man's playground. But in this case, it appears that sketchy records and perhaps negligent attitudes on the part of long-ago officials contributed to a haphazard accounting of those laid to rest in the cemetery.
The site was active for 20 years, from 1870 to 1890, when the D.C. Health Department ordered it closed because of marshy soil. But death records, along with an 1889 newspaper account, indicate that it was one of the busiest cemeteries of its day, with nearly 7,000 burials on its seven acres during 15 of those years, Belcher said.
From there, however, the numbers are unclear. A series of disinterments began in 1890, when the National Zoo, which abuts the site, bought a 1.7-acre strip. More graves were removed when Adams Mill Road was widened at the turn of the century. In 1940, when a developer bought the abandoned graveyard, a disinterment permit was obtained for as many as 1,500 bodies that were reburied at Woodlawn Cemetery in Southeast Washington, Belcher said. But a health inspector later announced that 129 graves were found on the site with human remains.
That was not the end of it. A D.C. newspaper reported in 1959 that police and health inspectors were called to the site after 14 incomplete human skeletons were uncovered.
The tendency of others to forget about or cavalierly dismiss these cemeteries was not unusual, given the times and prevailing attitudes, Mack said. In 1991, part of an 18th-century African American cemetery was discovered at the construction site of a federal building in New York near present-day City Hall. Within a year, workers had unearthed more than 400 skeletal remains, but historians believe as many as 20,000 people may have been buried in the vicinity.
"For a lot of people, basically powerless in the past, what happened to their sacred resting places? They got developed over," said Mack, who was involved in the New York project.
That could not have been what cemetery trustees had in mind when they bought the Adams Morgan tract in 1870 for about $2,500 from Charles Francis Adams, the son of President John Quincy Adams.
The 12 trustees, who wanted to secure burial plots for their families and friends, may have been a bit more prosperous and better situated than most African Americans after the Civil War. Some listed their occupations as laborers. But trustee Lindsay Muse, who would be buried there in 1883, worked as a messenger to the secretary of the Navy for more than 50 years, Belcher said. He was a freed man as early as 1827, records show, when he paid a Richmond woman $200 for his sister Charlotte's freedom.
"By the time he died, he had several parcels of property," Belcher said. "He apparently had a very large monument on his plot, and, of course, there are no markers there now."
Amelia Edmonson was laid to rest in the cemetery in 1874 at age 92. A Montgomery County native, she was the matriarch of a family that became famous in 1848 when six of her children tried to escape slavery on a ship that set off from the Seventh Street wharf in Southwest. Although they were soon captured, the episode became a cause celebre for abolitionists when two of Edmonson's daughters were about to be sold into prostitution in New Orleans, reportedly as punishment for the attempted escape. Abolitionists bought their freedom instead.
The Howard study, which will be conducted by several students, probably will not solve who is or is not buried there. It will entail "literally walking through the park on a grid system," Mack said, and will take about a month. The university, which is not being paid for the study, became involved at the request of Belcher and other neighbors. There is no estimate of possible costs.
Regina Williams, a spokeswoman for the D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation, said the department welcomes Howard's recommendations. "We're following the lead of the experts on this," she said.
"The history of this place is very, very important," Williams added, "and out of respect, there are no plans to do any exhuming at all."
On a recent morning, Pierce Park looked as it always does: full of life. A boy hurried through with a trumpet case; a woman coaxed her golden retriever toward the lively dog run. On the soccer field, a half-dozen young men paused in action, and so it would be, all day long -- people in and out, cutting through, lost in their own business.
Probably none of them knew what used to be there, back when it was only the whitewashed fence, the big shade trees and the graves.