Giving Chesco African American headstones the dignity they deserve
CHARLES FOX / Staff Photographer
Bill Turner does a rubbing from a tombstone in Bucktoe Cemetery. It revealed that this was the grave of William Maxfield. Many graves have been desecrated there.
Crystal Crampton knows why she is trying to restore the gravesites in the once-abandoned Bucktoe Cemetery in far southern Chester County.
"Everyone needs a headstone or a grave marker," Crampton said last week, "something that says that they had mattered in this world."
All the more so during the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, fought by some of the African Americans buried there.
Only seven legible headstones stand there now, and only two identify the deceased as members of what was known as Colored Infantry.
Although none of her relatives is buried there, on Thursday Crampton looked across the tree-shaded field on a narrow country road and, estimating that 100 African Americans, civilian and military, are yet to be found there, she said simply, "I say they're all mine."
A donor who wishes to remain anonymous has offered to pay for headstones of all those eventually identified as buried there.
Crampton, who lives in New Castle, Del., is a member of the New Garden Memorial Union A.M.E. Church in nearby Kennett Square. Its predecessor, dating to 1715, was situated next to the cemetery until the congregation moved into town in 1904.
In the 1980s, when Crampton was in her 20s, her mother's mother "took me down there a couple of times, and I saw it wasn't kept very well."
A field that she remembers as strewed with headstones and remnants of the burned-out church is now marked by a new wooden fence on three sides - Bucktoe Creek on the fourth - and graced by a new bench, as if waiting for survivors of the buried to visit.
The light of restoration shone where there had been darkness, when Crampton's church became partners with the Land Conservancy of Southern Chester County, whose Bucktoe Creek Preserve borders the cemetery.
The conservancy owns easements restricting development of more than 300 acres on the preserve, land that is owned by a local resident, Gwen Lacy, executive director the conservancy, said in an interview.
"In July of 2010, we were trying to find out who owned the cemetery, because it had been brought to our attention that it was all overgrown," Lacy said.
Once Lacy and Crampton got together, students from Tower Hill High School in Wilmington and Kennett Consolidated High School went out to clear the field.
Community efforts have raised more than $35,000 over the last two years, Lacy said, to make it look like a cemetery fitting for the memory of the soldiers.
Billed as what a sign calls a "a restoration of the original cemetery," it opened in November 2010, and the conservancy has tried to keep it in the public eye by including it in its annual two-hour Living History Hike in the spring.
For now, headstones reveal little.
"Corp'l Wilson Brown. Co. C. 127 U.S.C.I." reads one, which Crampton translates as a company of the U.S. Colored Infantry.
"Corp'l Wm. Jackson. Co.D. 29 CT Inf," reads the other, which she suggested means Colored Troop Infantry.
No birth or death dates. No indication of what they did in the military, and when.
Other headstones, giving no hint of military service, are more revealing.
"David Colwell. Died March 12th 1874 aged 58 years."
"Jeremiah Johnson. Born March 1st 1858. Died July 6th 1888."
"Agnes Millie Ford. Sept. 7, 1904. Aged 12 Years."
A row of five brand-new headstones, all blank, symbolize the unknown. They are replicas of the one best-preserved headstone, and Crampton hopes to have the five etched with the names of the buried, if their identities can be documented.
For now, possible burial plots have been marked off with ground-hugging tape, based on the work of Eugene Hough of Radnor, who was contacted by the Land Conservancy.
"I used ground-penetrating radar, looking for graves," Hough said in a phone interview, adding that he may have located several, based on the what he saw of the subsiding of the earth.
He said the mission of his one-man firm, Heritage Guild Works, "is cemetery and monument conservation and preservation."
Although the cemetery is out of the way and long abandoned, Hough said, "it's a matter of respect and doing right."
Contact Walter F. Naedele at 215-854-5607 or wnaedele@phillynews.com.
Philadelphia Inquirer, Tuesday, November 13, 2012, Local News, Page B1
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