AN OLD SLAVE CEMETERY, LOST BURIED TREASURE & A TRADITION OF UNMARKED GRAVES | MARSHALL PLANTATION

[Music] hey everybody it's robert coming to you with sidestep adventures i'm out here with mr dan aiken again and today we're going to take a look at a couple cemeteries but before we do that we're going to learn a little bit about some people that are buried in these cemeteries and also how dan knows what he knows about area history and the cemeteries around here first of all i have a lot of people to ask me how or why did you how did you gain the knowledge that you have on local history well i've always been interested in history i think i got that interest from my parents they they taught me to be interested in things of the past and i learned a lot growing up around my grandmother's and uh growing up here in waverly hall i was the only kid my age right here in town and i really had no other people to play with so i spent a lot of time with the older folks i spent a lot of time in the neighborhood here sitting on the front porch on sunday afternoons with my parents and with the neighbors and then on the town of talbott and nearby where my grandmother lived we would go over there and sit on the porch on sunday afternoons and i found myself just listening to uh stories of long ago well my my dad was in the plumbing business here in waverly hall and my i'm i'm number five out of six kids well my older brothers were his helpers and as time progressed along they went on and did their own thing and i became his helper and i started at around five or six years of age going into houses around here with him with with him doing work and i found myself sitting oftentimes when he was under the house or under a kitchen cabinet or somewhere doing work i would find myself sitting in there in the kitchen with the person that he was doing work for and striking up conversation and i found out at an early age that older people love to share their stories with someone who will listen and i had a good ear i didn't mind listening and i enjoyed sharing uh stories with them they would ask me what do you want to do when you grow up and i would talk to them about that and then they would tell me about their lives well i would start listening to things and pretty soon i developed a ability to ask questions well what was the drugstore like when you were a kid and or what what did what did you do at the depot when the train came in did you did you go out and meet the train and and and see who got on and off and so forth and they would tell me about train rides to columbus and so forth but going into all the houses around here uh i developed a ability to listen to people both black and white and i was really really fascinated with the black history and i was even more fascinated that there were one or two people here in town that would really really open up and share their history with me and later on there was even more people who would open up and share their history with me but one of the first and one of the people that i thought the most of was a man named arthur horton and everybody knew him as bud well mr bud as we called him he lived on the outskirts of town and he was a member of a very very old family here his mother had been raised on the marshall plantation the marshall plantation was a big farm right outside of town in talbot county here and his mother had been raised there and he was able to point onto the walls there in his house and show me the faces of all the people that he talked about and all the stories that he would tell me he could point to each portrait on the wall and i was really fascinated with that well mr budd passed away in 1980 uh let's see he passed away in 1982 at 96 years of age and he had a adopted daughter who came down and liquidated everything in his house and i happened to go into an antique shop later here and i found the pictures that were hanging on the wall there and i knew every one of them because i remembered all the stories about them well the antique dealer that had the pictures bought the frames he didn't want the pictures so he gave me the pictures out of the frames and i brought the pictures up here to my shop and they've been here ever since but anyway this right here is mr bud horton and he was born in 1880 let's see he was born in 1885 and died in 1982 that is his brother julius julius was born in 1877 and died in 1924 this is their mother and her name was lily marshall copeland mahoney she was born on the william marshall plantation just outside of waverly hall in 1844 or thereabouts and she died in 1892. well she was the mother of 14 boys and four girls according to mr budd [Music] she married arch horton and arch horton had been a slave on the horton plantation in harris county and she had been a slave on the william marshall place in talbot county well after emancipation mr arch horton and she got married and they moved to the back side of the marshall plantation and they tenant farmed there for the marshals and later i think they uh sharecropped with the marshals and also for the willis family and for a couple of other families out there in that area well when she died she was buried in the cemetery that you've done a video on i believe what we call it the mahon family cemetery that's out on weaver road i believe he told me that she was buried there along with his uh his father arch horton and there is a marked grave there of one of the hortons which i believe may be one of his sisters but anyway this kind of puts a face with some of those unmarked graves that we are accustomed to seeing out in the woods and where we just see a rock at the head and the foot well in one of my conversations with mr budd one of the things that i learned about the cemeteries here is that uh we're out here on the front porch of the shop right in town where there's a lot of traffic i know it's kind of hard to hear one of the things that i learned from mr bud was the tradition of unmarked graves in discussing the cemeteries around here with mr bud i asked him about his mother and his father's graves and whether or not they were marked and he said by marker do you mean do they have a name on the grave and i said yes and he said no there's no name on their graves he said but and you know i asked was that because of the cost of a marker at the time and he said well markers were pretty expensive then he said but there were enough of us we could have done it if we wanted to he said but in our family he says we go by the old beliefs and i said what is that he said well the old way was when you that when a family member dies you leave your grief at the cemetery he said when we finished up at the cemetery and that grave was covered he said the men folks did the grave digging and covered the grave up so when the men folks finished you left the cemetery and you left your grief there and you never went back until there was another death and you had to go back and dig another grave or have another burial but that was their beliefs and their beliefs are in other words he said their beliefs came over with he said back in slavery days that belief was brought as he said from the old country and he spoke of the old country a lot because he had stories that had been handed down you know these people his family lived on the same farm in the same place for a hundred years and there were four or five generations that had lived there and had handed stories down to one another and he recalled that uh his ancestors buried there in that cemetery brought with them a tradition of disguising a grave at the time of a burial that they would actually cover it with with pine straw and leaves and he said they would try to disguise it as much as possible and just leave and he said that was that was the end of of any grief he said you left it there the picture over here on the far right is his wife's mother and daddy now mr art mr budd was married to uh sarah carter and this is sarah carter's mother and daddy miss sarah died in 1975 and her daddy was robert carter and her mother was may marshall carter now sudy may was also born into slavery she was born around 1862 on the same marshall plantation as mr budd's mother was born her nickname was suki and i understand they had a lot of children also they had they were married in 1876 and were the parents of mose carter fletcher carter sarah carter horton della francis william sukey joe acy and john t carter those were their children [Music] well these pictures hung in mr bud's house like i said until his death but but mr bud here i learned a lot of local history from him he loved to talk and when he found out that i was uh [Music] really interested with a with a genuine interest he opened up to me and i spent many cold rainy days in his house sitting by a heater talking to him and he he imparted a lot of knowledge to me as far as local history goes and one other thing about him he was the local herbalist for the uh community a lot of people went out there and he would mix different uh teas root he would go down on the creek and dig yellow root and he had a trunk that he kept all these things in and i do remember that the the house that he lived in was trimmed in blue and i think everyone knows that that's a tradition with with some of the old black uh herbalist that they would trim things in blue to let people know that there was an herb doctor that lived in a certain house his windows was trimmed in blue and or were trimmed in blue and he had a trunk that he kept everything in and that trunk was painted blue and my mother owns the trunk to this day it was it was purchased by my dad from his daughter when she liquidated the estate and he was able to purchase a number of things from her but the pictures were something that i was really proud to get and were saved from the trash and they they were initially offered to a member of the family but the member of the family they were offered to was a member of the primitive baptist church and that member of the family said that the primitive baptists did not believe in keeping photographs of the dead so that's the reason that they were sold all right so now we are in the woods um and we're specifically on the old marshall plantation and even more specific than that we are on the old marshall slave cemetery and as is often um in a case like this we're absolutely surrounded by graves most of them are just indentions in the ground in fact i'll turn the camera around in just a minute and we can see a row out here and while there are a few uh post emancipation barrels out here you said that most of these graves out here are strictly grazed from slavery times right most of these are strictly antebellum days uh pre-civil war before emancipation most of the marshals after emancipation are buried in a church yard right over here called bluff springs or they're buried at salem baptist church or they're buried over at the other cemetery which is just a few miles through the woods here known as the mahone willis horton cemetery and there's some marshalls buried there also so this is this strictly began as a farm cemetery for the marshall place mr marshall the owner of this place is buried in the waverly hall cemetery where the methodist church used to be in the old days uh which was originally mount zion methodist church where he was a member and when the uh when when this was the main highway out here between columbus and uh what was then the capital of georgia millersville state capitol uh this was known as the old federal road and it's called the old alabama road and mr marshall's house faced that road and henry clay was one of the guests in his house and made a speech there henry clay being a wig politician prior to the war between the states mr marshall was a big time wig also and mr marshall was a state representative and he represented talbot county when the state of georgia succeeded from the union and he had to list his net worth and i believe he had a net worth at the time of 144 thousand dollars which was a lot of money back in those days and he had to list how many slaves he owned and i believe that he owned 88 at the time that he uh signed up so uh i also read once that i believe he was shown as not voting when it came time to vote whether or not to succeed that he he kind of took a neutral stance right so if we look down right here you'll see a large indention and i know that these are always kind of hard to see on camera but if you follow up there's another one and another one and another one and then over there there's another one another one and they are scattered all throughout these woods and this this would have been one of the cemeteries that mr bud horton told me about that they believed in leaving behind when after the burial if you notice i don't see too many rocks at the head in the foot of each grave so that leads me to think that once that burial was done no one came back here and marked these graves in any way there may be some out here with a head stone at the foot and the head but i don't see too many do you no i do not i see a lot of graves though i do see a lot of greys there's one here and one there and then there and there and there and we are absolutely surrounded by graves out here um i have actually walked to the cemetery before i've never filmed it and i was impressed with the amount of graves that were out here um it was a little bit easier to see last time i was out here because none of the growth had started and this tree hadn't fallen last time i was out here either but there are there are a lot of graves out here and it goes pretty far back [Music] since we come back here we do have more that have headstones on it so this cemetery starts all the way if you can see my jeep at the road it basically starts all the way over there and then as we come through over here it continues down to the end here and we do have a few that have field stones as we get into this back portion of the cemetery we've got three in a row right here two more down there and then all of these over here have a look at these stan i just i thought this was pretty interesting that these all throughout there there's no stones but these at the back do have stones and also look at the look at the row right there there's one two three four five and six and seven and eight and then over here there's one right here the field stone at the end and one right beside it now as far as i can tell as we get over here the graves kind of stop that's the furthest one that i see over there then it's terraced off and the ground is eroded right here um so so row of fieldstones right here and now we have the marked graves that are out here i believe that there are four marked graves like that says josephine marshall it does josephine marshall born looks like 1949 it looks like born and died 1949. [Music] born august 3rd 1949 and died september 9th well it definitely says 1904 so it's got to be 1949. that's by the people's funeral home in columbus georgia now again fieldstone big field stone and indention right there [Music] and this says in remembrance of the scorpion um in remembrance of mrs rosa barber and if there is a date on it it is sank so far in the ground that i won't be able to read it [Music] maybe one right there um [Music] these two graves are pretty interesting here this is marsh marshall jr he died august the 9th 1917 right beside him is his father marsh marshall who died february the 10th 1915 it says at rest and um i'm i'm guessing that marsh marshall jr since he only died two years after his father probably didn't live very long of course we don't have a birth date or an age but i thought you know isn't that just an interesting name marsh marshall and again father and son who died not too far apart from each other and as far as i know these four graves here are the only marked graves out here when i walked around before it was a little bit easier to see stuff wasn't getting green but there are a lot of graves out here this is a place you know if we figured what do we figure two 200 in samantha street and this is this is a little bit bigger i think than the uh whitehead cemetery so say at least 200 people out here because they are they're all in perfect rows big cemetery a lot of burials also big old dead cedar trees all right dan so having walked the cemetery up there we don't have much markings on the graves not even fieldstones down here we have four marked graves and the field stones start to show up what's your thoughts on that well the cemetery i believe would have began on the highest ground that's where it would have started and then as that filled up it would have worked its way on down this direction it couldn't go the other direction because there's a road out there so it came this direction and i think the newer burials took place on down the hill here uh higher ground being the more desirable spots that's evidenced by the dates here on 1915 and the baby that's buried there in the 1940s and that rock of that concrete marker over there is similar to the terry graves up on the mountain and that's what 1950s maybe that miss barber oh we can probably look her up and find what the dates were on that uh somehow through census records or something maybe or maybe it should be a death certificate filed on her somewhere but what i would give to have had a camera and been able to come out here with mr bud when he was alive because he would have known more about this than anyone alive today or anyone alive at the time of his uh of his 96th year he spoke of this place very often he spoke of this whole farm he knew everything here and he was the one who told me the story that i think everyone that lives around here has heard that when the union soldiers were coming through mr william marshall put all of his gold and silver into a container and brought it back here near this cemetery between here in the house not here between here and where the house was and he buried all of his gold later he went back to retrieve it and could never find it he could never find the spot where he hid it and to this day they say it's still hidden his own great grandchildren told me that story and they told me that it was true that it was not just a rumor it was not a legend it was it was a fact that he buried a good bit of money back here when the yankee soldiers were coming through as they said and uh the only thing that i can add to that is that when my daddy was growing up in talbot county he said there was a black man who used to come to the stores in tarleton at christmas time and that every christmas he brought a 20 gold piece to the stores and this was in the 1930s on up until late 1930s early 30s to late 30s when people were really having a hard time making a living then and he would bring one gold piece in and he would do his uh pay off his bills buy for his family and anyone else who was in need of at his church and he paid for it with a pre-civil war gold piece and of course the merchants would always say where did you get this and he would always tell them the same story that he had a dream and he was told in the dream where to go get this money when he needed it and he was told to only get what he needed and not get a penny more and that each time he needed it it would be there for him the next time as long as he did not ever divulge the location so he went there after having this dream and he found the money and he did exactly what the dream told him he took one piece paid his bills and he was uh i guess he had self-restraint enough to never go back except once a year when he needed it and needless to say a lot of people followed that man everywhere he went because around christmas time they would always want to know where he was and what part of the county he was in but no one ever knew until he arrived at the store with his gold piece you

Channel: Sidestep: Adventures Into History

Views: 179,704

Keywords: slave cemetery, cemetery, slave, slaves, slavery, pa slave cemetery, haunted cemetery, fort hunter slave cemetery, slave cemetery discovered, hidden history: slave cemetery, slaves buried at family cemetery, 1619 slavery cemetery history 400 years, soapstone cemetery, abandoned cemetery, blackstock cemetery, cemetry, slave history, historic cemetery, my visit to a cemetery where slaves were buried, slave trade, historic texas cemetery, black history

Id: j7MW1w74otE

Length: 29min 5sec (1745 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 30 2022