![]() She said Thomas provided a possible template for how to restore the old grounds. Kostelny said African American communities often know of their own cemeteries for years, and interest had soared in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. Don McEachin (D-Va.) was chief co-sponsored of a bill to creating a network of African American burial grounds a recent Virginia law allocated funding for maintaining the historic sites.Įlizabeth Kostelny, the CEO of the Richmond-based Preservation Virginia, says she recruited Thomas to speak about her experiences. Thomas's quest is part of a rising state and national interest in African American sites, says Brent Leggs, executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Thomas restored the graveyard and then returned to use as a final resting place for her son. Pastor Michelle Thomas poses for a portrait at the African American Burial Ground for the Enslaved at Belmont in Ashburn, Va. Thomas has since worked to restore more graveyards, including Tippets Hill in Sterling, Va. For his efforts, Jaka was recognized by the World Organization of the Scout Movement at the United Nations and by the Virginia General Assembly. ![]() She also mobilized the community: a local Boy Scout, Mikaeel Martinez Jaka, organized more than 100 volunteers to pave a gravel path that would lead visitors into the woods. Two years later, she pushed the Toll Brothers real estate developers to donate the 2.75 acres on which the cemetery lay. In 2015, she dedicated the graveyard and created the Loudoun Freedom Center to promote historical preservation. Thomas said she had passed the graveyard unwittingly hundreds of times.įinding the fieldstones fueled Thomas, who put her church plans on hold and threw herself into restoring the cemetery. In the early 2000s, local activists prevented it from being encircled by a highway interchange, but they did not have the resources to maintain the graves. ![]() At the former Belmont Plantation, now a country club, the enslaved were laid to rest near a rock quarry and were eventually abandoned. This is a common fate for African American burial grounds across the country and in Loudoun County, which prior to the Civil War saw as much as a quarter of its population enslaved. Enslaved people once made up more than a quarter of the county's population, but their graves, like these, were often neglected. Rough, unmarked stones mark graves at the the African American Burial Ground for the Enslaved at Belmont in Loudoun County, Va. "All that paperwork existed, we just had no one that was interested or demanding that this history be told." "What was more deplorable is that information existed," she said. She was outraged that despite having records of its existence, the county had done little to maintain or mark the grounds. When she followed a map to the site across Harry Byrd Highway in Ashburn, she could see fieldstones and depressions in the earth marking graves. Then she found the Belmont listing, with records dating back to 1854. In 2015, she set out to build a church for her Holy and Whole Life Changing Ministries, based in Landsdowne, Va.Īt first, she says she researched county records to avoid building on a burial ground. She works with the exactitude of an electrical engineer, her first career. "He brings the message of freedom to the ancestors that eventually, we made it to the other side." Remembering A Forgotten CemeteryĪt 49, Thomas speaks with a booming voice honed at the pulpit. "My son is the first African American person who was born free to be buried in this cemetery," Thomas says. Steps away from the old fieldstones she had uncovered, she says the fresh grave sent a signal. The pastor laid her son to rest in the cemetery she had fought to restore. In June, Thomas's 16-year-old son Fitz drowned. ![]() Her work sparked new interest in other abandoned African American graveyards, setting an example for preservationists across Virginia. Thomas led a community effort to gain custody of the grounds and clear the overgrowth and trees that obscured the old fieldstones. In Folder 17 of a county collection she found a listing that caught her eye: "Slave Cemetery - Belmont Plantation." It became her life's work. ![]() Pastor Michelle Thomas was scouring Loudoun County records five years ago for evidence of the enslaved people who once toiled on the area's plantations. Her son, Fitz Alexander Campbell Thomas, 16, died in June and is the first free African American to be buried at the site. Surrounded by loved ones, Pastor Michelle Thomas grieves at the stone marking her son's grave at the African American Burial Ground for the Enslaved at Belmont. ![]()
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