Roughly 275 burial plots of the formerly enslaved and sharecroppers at Danville, Va.’s Oak Hill plantation site are being moved to make way for an industrial park. Oak Hill, built in 1820, was the home of slaver Samuel Hairston, considered to be one of the largest enslavers in the south, but was vandalized and burned down in 1988. The only thing left of the once prominent home on the property is the bricked foundation of the home leaving an outline of the main house.
According to NBC News, descendants of the buried Black families are torn about moving the remains from one site to another, though the family says they’ve been involved in the process, which has been comforting. So far, archaeologists have begun the process of exhuming the remains; some are already in funeral homes being prepared to be moved to the new burial site about a mile away from the current burial place.
“I don’t think anybody would want their ancestors exhumed or moved. But for them to give us a lot of say-so in the new cemetery, down to the design details and the plaques and memorials that we put up, I feel like (they’re) really doing it in a dignified way, in a respectful way,” said Jeff Bennett, whose great-great-great grandfather is buried at Oak Hill.
The cemetery is being moved to make way for a battery production facility built by the company Microporous. The land where the facility is being built was purchased by the Pittsylvania-Danville Regional Industrial Facility Authority; the authority purchased over 3,500 acres of land, which also happened to include that of the former Oak Hill plantation.
Part of the concern of moving the gravesite is that historically, Black gravesites for the enslaved have often been subject to neglect, or in the worst case scenarios, paved over entirely.
Ultimately, the descendants of those buried on the Oak Hill plantation want to be able to finally lay their family members who were enslaved and exploited to rest. They say the process of exhuming them is one last indignity for those who suffered through so much.
Said Bennett, “It just seems that 100 or so odd years after their death, there’s still no rest.”
