We just finished work on a site where there were two family
cemeteries of slaveholding families.

In one case there was a marked family burial ground and a vague
folkloric recollection that there had been a slave cemetery next to
it. We scraped and found more graves in the family plot but we were
not able to identify the slave burials.

In the other case, there was a deed specifying two plots, one for the
family and one for their servants.  When the farm was sold out of the
family, the two plots were specified, but not located. The
brick-walled family graveyard was easy to find, so we scraped around
it, looking for the outlying unmarked graves that are so common in
family burial grounds in Delaware. We found fenceposts indicating
another enclosure adjacent, and one grave in the far end of this
enclosure.  We may have identified this slave burial ground.
Apparently there was one user, but no more.

As for the machine to be used, I would unequivocally reject any
machine except a Gradall. For some of the reasons Lyle Browning
mentioned, any 'dozer type machine or road grader should never
("never" emphasized) be used if the land is the least bit soft. We
always specify a Gradall with a five-foot smooth blade, and if we
know the company, we specify the operator.  The Gradall should come
with a dump truck to carry off the spoil if the site is extensive.

A good Gradall operator can cut off the plowzone and incrementally
remove an inch at a time, under direct supervision of the
archaeologist.  In our area there are several Gradall operators with
years of experience in archaeology, who come onto the site with a
clear knowledge of what we need, and they deliver.

On one occasion, we used a backhoe with a steel plate welded across
the teeth, about five feet wide on a two-foot bucket. We did this
because we were tracing an abandoned church's fenceline in wooded
conditions where the Gradall would not fit. The results were
satisfactory, but for those of us who had experience with Gradalls, a
little clumsy.

As for the Eppes Island slave cemetery, there is documentation by the
great grandson of a white owner who was buried there. In a diary
entry just before the Civil War, Dr. Eppes mentioned a slave cemetery
near a house site, where he noted that also his ancestor was buried.
He didn't mention any others.

We need to remember that gravestones were not terribly common in some
areas of the country, whether for religious or economic, or social
reasons. In Virginia there are some elegant wealthy family burial
grounds, but in Delaware we have few stones outside churchyards.
Caesar Rodney, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was
buried in an unmarked family plot with over a hundred burials,
delineated only by a boundary ditch. I have always suspected that the
Presbyterians and Quakers might have looked down on display. Even
quite well-off families, such as the Dickinsons and the Rodneys,
buried on their farms in unmarked plots, or with only the simplest
delineations.  I'm digging one right now, that probably contains the
remains of a person who owned five farms, and have records that it
was never marked except by an enclosure.

Then there are cases where black churches have taken over former
white churches and their cemeteries. I suspect that the black
families had buried their dead in these cemeteries before the
changeover.  There's an example of this in Dan Weiskotten's territory
at Bermuda Hundred, Virginia, where there is a black Baptist church
on the colonial townsite, in the place where logic dictates a church
of the Established Church of England could have stood during colonial
times. There is a tombstone near the edge of the present churchyard
of a sailor's burial early in the nineteenth century.  Even though
there is no record of a church standing there during the period of
Established religion in Virginia, the physical and geographical
evidence points to such.  The nearest chapel of Dale Parish was a few
miles away, in Ware Bottom, not terribly convenient for burial
purposes to the people at Bermuda Hundred.

In this day of perfumed embalming, we tend to forget the urgency of
burial in former times.  In Delaware, quantities of rum were
considered an essential cost among the funeral accounts.  We recently
identified a lone burial, in a poorly-shaped grave shaft, with one
arm sticking straight up. We don't think of rigor mortis today, but
look at the many photos of corpses laid out with a bandanna firmly
tied to hold the chin shut.  My father told a story of a summer
burial, where the corpse was so bloated that it would not fit in the
coffin, so they buried him in the box it came in. The Jewish and
Muslim tradition of almost immediate burial is health related, and
there was a reason that town fathers in the eighteenth century
mandated exclusion of human burials from certain cities, especially
ones with clay soils. There is a church in Maryland, built on a clay
hill, with a cemetery some distance away on a sand hill, for reasons
that should be obvious. Our ancestors were quite practical about
disposal of the dead.

Are there other instances of cemeteries being used by successor
congregations on the same church site?  It might be interesting to
see if burial customs changed.

--
There once was a zealot named Bush
whose brain was quite close to his tush.
To get oil from Iraq
and bring body bags back
he destroyed the U.S. in the crush.