Mapping Memory

Preserving the legacy of a historic cemetery

In a lightly wooded pocket of modern-day Newburg, sits a modest Louisville neighborhood cemetery. Beneath its uneven ground are graves dating back to the early 1800s, some with inscriptions nearly lost to time; others the land has simply swallowed. Behind these weathered markers lies nearly two centuries of stories and the collective memory of a community.

Through ground mapping, penetrating radar and oral history efforts, a team of interdisciplinary researchers and students are working to digitally map, document and preserve this historic site, known today as the Petersburg Newburg Cemetery. One of Kentucky’s oldest Black burial grounds, its stable and unchanging presence has long been a cornerstone of the community. 

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Having evolved from a slave burial ground, the cemetery gets its origins from the Eliza Tevis estate, a significant African American landowner in antebellum Jefferson County. Situated in Louisville’s “wet woods,” this area was once a refuge for newly freed families after the Civil War. Tevis, an emancipated woman and community matriarch, rented and sold over 40 acres of this property to newly freed enslaved people, helping to establish both the rural African American community of Petersburg (now Newburg) and the Forest Baptist Church that adjoins the cemetery. 

While the cemetery is the final resting place of Tevis and other early settlers of Petersburg, it is still an active site. It is maintained by the Petersburg-Newburg Cemetery Committee, a team of members with deep ties to the land who are devoted to upholding it as a space of dignity and heritage.

A community effort

For Stephen Williams, serving on the Petersburg-Newburg Cemetery Committee for almost 30 years has brought him closer to family. As president of the board, he attends almost every funeral had on the grounds and it is not unusual to find him striking up a conversation with mourners only to discover a shared history or newly found relative. “You can tell who is from here, because they stay and walk around after a service,” Williams said. “Community members who moved on to live somewhere else or have the means to be buried elsewhere often come back to be buried here. They choose to come home.”

Founded in 1992, members of the Petersburg-Newburg neighborhood joined together to purchase the property after it fell into neglect. Today, members work to coordinate groundskeeping, community outreach initiatives and grave marking to preserve this sacred ground for future generations. 

Among these efforts are markers made of white PVC pipe adorned with laminated plaques. These temporary crosses, a tradition passed down from former committee leader Donald Goodwin, prevent graves from going unmarked and help preserve the text of headstones that are almost washed away or have eroded with time. 

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For Williams, who has over 20 relatives buried on the premises, the cemetery is a place of enduring memory. “It houses a rich history of the people I grew up with,” he said. “Sometimes, when I’m there and I look out toward the west, it brings me back to the way the sun would set through our kitchen window.”

Learning through legacy

Grant support from the Engagement Scholarship Consortium allowed university researchers to conduct GPS mapping of the cemetery as well as oral and archival research with aging community members who still had stories to tell. 

Recognizing the significance of the site, the team took a community first approach, beginning their work by meeting with residents and committee members to hear firsthand their familial connection to the land. Residents showed up to the committee’s annual fish fry to pour over photographs and share stories of loved ones buried at the cemetery. 

For anthropologist and researcher Kathryn Marklein, this project is an example of how research, education and community partnership can restore not just headstones, but heritage. 

“There are few research projects where you feel a sense of belonging in terms of what you’re contributing as a group,” she said. “The work we’re doing has an immediate impact. It’s a privilege to have descendants welcome you into their homes and community and openly share these stories.”

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To help preserve the site digitally, a pair of student researchers led by researcher and anthropologist Aaron Comstock, collected spatial data, mapping headstones and photographing markers to build a database that will be used for a mobile app that visitors can use to locate relatives.

Committee members hope the map will help residents find loved ones and feel a sense of pride in the cemetery. 

“It's the place where everything started,” Williams said. “So much information and history is buried here, and we are working to preserve those stories.”

For undergraduate student Danyelle White, this field experience transcended the classroom and solidified her place within anthropology. “When people think about research, they think of a lab. Working in the field and talking to committee members really expanded that definition for me,” White said. “I truly am impacting my community through this project and am able to give back to the neighborhood I was raised in."

Building on this work, historian Felicia Jamison created a public humanities course around the Petersburg-Cemetery initiative. In the class, graduate and undergraduate students led oral history and archival research efforts, transcribing, recording and preserving the histories of people buried at the cemetery. These local histories are now preserved for future generations at the UofL Oral History Center housed within the UofL Archives & Special Collections.

“Projects like this are important because it makes history real,” Jamison said.

Due to low elevation and soil composition, the cemetery has faced issues of water retention, resulting in lost or sunken grave sites overtime. During the next phase of the project, the research team will use ground penetrating radar to ensure that every resting place is uncovered and documented.

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 “We hope to help our community partners reveal missing headstones and identify unmarked graves, allowing us to create markers and guide future work at the cemetery,” Comstock said.

While more discoveries wait to be unearthed, Williams said he is proud of the changes the cemetery has gone through.

“So much has been restored. It amazes me what it came from. I have nothing but pride.”