Volunteers and archeologists on Monday cleared brush from the woods around Sacred Heart Chapel in Bowie, Md., bringing sunlight to long-hidden stones that marked the graves of enslaved people.
Porter’s forebears and hundreds of other enslaved people had once worked and worshiped at this Jesuit outpost near the Patuxent River, held in bondage by some of the priests and brothers who were building the Catholic church in the nascent United States. Their final resting places have long faded from view, subsumed by nature even as the adjacent cemetery for White parishioners was tidied and honored through the ages.
Porter was bending over a just-uncovered stone, trying to make out the faint carving to see if it was one of the family names he has studied, the Queens, Campbells and Taylors.Most of the gravestones are simple field rocks embedded upright in the soil. It will take close analysis — and maybe electronic imaging — to see if any retain traces of lettering. But a few yards away, volunteers were raking debris from the clearly carved stone of Monica A. Queen , Porter’s great-great-great aunt.
For decades, the graves have existed in a parallel history tended mostly by their descendants and a few specialist historians. Now, as part of a burgeoning accounting of enslavement by Jesuit institutions, the cemetery has burst into the public glare. Masur is a Catholic University archaeologist and a specialist in the cemeteries of enslaved people. She has recently been researching uncovered gravestones at the 17th-century St. Francis Xavier parish in Newtowne, Md. The Archdiocese of Washington, which now owns the White Marsh properties, asked her to help clear and map this cemetery and to work with descendants on plans to restore or curate the site.
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