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Survey of Lexington cemetery finds more than 30 potential unmarked grave sites

A survey of the Lexington City Cemetery has identified more than 30 possible sites where enslaved people were buried in unmarked graves. The survey was done in July using ground-penetrating radar on a roughly tenth-of-an-acre portion of the cemetery. 

The only physical tribute is a stacked stone and masonry memorial letting visitors know that enslaved people were buried here before the Civil War. There is no known record of who erected the memorial or when. The survey found 18 probable unmarked burials and 14 more that researchers believe are possible sites. 

Mayor Jason Hayes says the project is important as the city works to properly memorialize the people anonymously interred.

“I'm really grateful to the community stakeholders that for at least a few years now have been raising awareness, and educating and advocating for those individuals that were buried there,” he says.

The cemetery is listed in the National Register of Historic Places, and Hayes says information from the survey will be added to the entry.

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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