Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
‘A DREAM COME TRUE’
Mt. Zion AME Church in Devon uses technology to locate grave sites
TREDYFFRIN » To look at the group of headstones in the cemetery of the 171 yearold Mt. Zion AME Church in Devon, one might think just a few people are buried there. But looks can be deceiving; the cemetery is actually full.
Sunken and damaged headstones, poor markings, and time have hidden the locations of those buried there.
Bertha Jackmon, historian at the church, said while there are some written records of burials, most have been lost or destroyed. The church has been trying for years to pinpoint the spots of its ancestors, including 21 Civil War veterans.
The church and the graveyard are both on the National Register of Historic Places with the cornerstone of the church placed in 1861 just as the Civil War was breaking out.
Jackmon has been working with the Pennsylvania Hallowed Grounds project, which works to raise awareness of the burial grounds and legacies of US Colored Troops and other early Black Pennsylvanians.
Through the Hallowed Grounds project, Mt. Zion was put in touch with Jason Herrmann, an anthropological archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Herrmann, who specializes the relationship between humans
and their environment in historic settings, usually finds himself in places like Turkey and the Middle East, but recently he spent three days using geographic information science tools to map Mt. Zion.
Hermann set up a grid system, then used different technologies to analyze the land included in the grid — a drone to develop a threedimensional map of the nearly one acre property, a magnetic gradiometer to measure changes in the earth’s magnetic field and objects in the ground, and an electrical board resistance meter.
Herrmann said the electrical board resistance meter sends a low voltage current between two probes which are pushed into the ground. A reading is taken. The reading is influenced by compactness of the soil in the subsurface and moisture content .
“Human activity — in putting these people in the ground, in creating grave shafts, even in our informal passage on paths — those all affect the soil in different ways,” said Herrmann. “We can use this to map the distribution of different soil properties and look at that map and connect it to distribution of headstones, the shape of the landscape on the surface and hopefully we can find unmarked graves or other evidence for the landscape when the cemetery and church was established.”
They also have plans to use ground-penetrating radar in the coming days.
“This is a dream come true for the church. We’ve been talking about having it done for years,” said Jackmon. “I can’t tell you what it means to us. The way he is conducting the investigation is way more than we ever expected. We can’t wait for the results. One of the things we’re going to do with the information is to plot the headstones and match up names and have it all written out.”
Jackmon has also been working with the Find A Grave website to document the cemetery. The website lists 163 graves identified at Mt. Zion with two dating back to 1877. The church history reports the last person buried in the cemetery was Mollie Hopkins, who died in 1952.
In 2013, Civil War US Colored Troop Sgt. Isaac “Ike” Hall, 32nd Regiment, Company K, was identified as having been interred at Mt. Zion by his great-greatgranddaughter, Dianne Cross. She and the church filed a claim with the Veterans Affairs Department and were able to have an official US Veterans marker installed.
Herrmann said his study at Mt. Zion is part of a larger project at the Penn Museum looking at African American cemeteries and incorporating, not just students from Penn but members of the community, to get them involved. Normally he would have students out with him in the field, but pandemic restrictions had stopped that. Nonetheless, they are trying to bring people into the process. At Mt. Zion, Jackmon had a chance to perform some of the testing herself.
“As you can see, we can easily have people collect data in the field, bring people into the process, not just collecting and creating the data but interpreting it later,” Herrmann said.
“African-American cemeteries in Philadelphia have a rough history where a lot of them were moved,” said Herrmann. “Center City and South Philadelphia in particular, sometimes (they were moved) twice. Sometimes there is evidence they just said they moved them, then built or paved over them.”
“There is a lot we can do to reconstruct the mortuary history of AfricanAmericans in Philadelphia using non-invasive techniques like this to get a better picture of at least where the burials are and how those spaces may have been used using things like geophysics, like here.”
Herrmann hopes to have some preliminary results in the coming weeks.