FLORENCE, S.C. (AP) - A project that has been in progress for three decades seeks to remind people that family and history matter and need to be preserved and honored.

The Community Cemetery Project, encompassing the North View/Baptist/Williams cemetery, was started out of necessity when community members noticed that burial sites were being neglected.

A letter dated Jan. 12, 1985, states that the Men’s Club at Trinity Baptist Church came up with the idea for the group in order to have “perpetual upkeep of the Baptist North View and Williams cemeteries located at Roughfork Street” and asks “families with loved ones in these cemeteries to cooperate spiritually and financially to enhance this worthwhile effort.”

The three cemeteries are on a total of twelve acres; the Baptist portion is the oldest.

Ben Zeigler, president of the Florence County Historical Society, got involved with the project at the request of Dr. Allie Brooks, the chairman of the original steering committee.

“I started to do some historical research and I found that the cemetery has profound historical significance for the history of this community in general and the African-American community in particular,” Zeigler said. “It really is a hidden treasure because it is a historical site that not a lot of people know a great deal about. It has great potential to be a celebration of the history of the Florence community.”

Zeigler’s research led him to documents that give a rough age for the cemetery.

“The cemetery goes back probably close to two hundred years now,” Zeigler said. “We believe, and we have strong evidence of this, that the cemetery was an African-American slave cemetery on the plantation of George Washington Dargan, for whom Dargan Street is named. We discovered some deeds from the 1870s and 1880s, so just a decade after the Civil War, which reference this as an existing cemetery.”

Hundreds of people from Florence’s past are buried there and it still used today. A summary of Zeigler’s research, compiled for an application for federal grant money to be used to preserve the cemetery, lists Jacob L. Smart and S.W. Williams among those in the cemetery.

Smart was “an organizer for the Lincoln Light Infantry in Florence in 1872” as well as “a policeman in Florence in the 1890s, and thus an early African-American law enforcement officer.” Williams was a “County Commissioner of Darlington County and was active in Republican politics in Reconstruction and afterward.”

It is also believed that Nathaniel D. Harper, “the first African-American elected to Town Council of the young municipality of Florence,” is buried in the cemetery. There are soldiers from the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II and more recent conflicts.

The Community Cemetery Project has sought funds to help preserve the cemetery and Florence County, the Florence County Historical Society, the City of Florence and the North View/Baptist/Williams Cemetery Committee have all contributed, for a total of $17,789.50. The project then sought matching funds in the form of a federal historic preservation grant.

“We are looking to bring the cemetery to the status that is deserves as sort of a focal point of the community,” Zeigler said. “It a block away from a big elementary school. What a great resource for students.”

The South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, from the University of South Carolina, was brought in to help assess the cemetery. The plan was that archaeologist would document the cemetery in two phases.

They would start with the visible markers in the cemetery, including headstones and footstones; later they would use equipment to see below the ground to determine if large open spaces include indications of unmarked graves. This information, once compiled, will allow for a master plan to be drawn up. This will include plans for public access to the cemetery, for signs and for a more complete record of those buried there.

Committee members Maretha Downs and James Spears, who have had family members involved in the project from the beginning, said that visiting and caring for graves isn’t instilled in younger generations the way it was in them.

“When I go to the Baptist (cemetery) to put flowers on my family grave, my brother and sister-in-law, I also have to go to Palmetto Baptist Church over in Darlington, back up in the woods, to put flowers on my parents’ and grandparents’ graves. When I do one, I do the other,” Downs said.

Brooks said there have been previous attempts by city council members to clean up the cemetery but there was no continuity. With only five of the original committee members still alive, many of them in their 90s, he said, it is imperative for families to take ownership of these properties.

“We need more commitment from the family members of the people buried out there, even if they don’t live here,” Brooks said. “If everyone contributed, this would not be such a burden for us. We do have contributions that come in from funeral homes and churches; Brown Memorials has come in and done pro-bono services to upright some of the headstones. We have had little success, though, in getting volunteers to come out there and help clean up.”

“Some of our committee members have taken money out of their own pocket because going back to the way it was in 1984, that isn’t an option,” he said.

The Community Cemetery Project meets on the third Tuesday of every month at 7 p.m. at the Trinity Baptist Church annex building, 124 W. Darlington St. Everyone is invited.

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Information from: Morning News, https://www.scnow.com

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