A coming home for Freemantown descendants at Berry College
With descendants of the five families of Freemantown coming together at Berry College on Saturday, the legacy they represent is now being carried on through the creation of a historical society.
The Freemantown Historical Society aims to keep the memory of the post-Civil War, AfricanAmerican settlement alive.
“Though this is Berry College,” said Cheryl Freeman Snipes, the president of the newly created historical society, “this was once Freemantown’s home.”
Snipes, who organized the Freemantown celebration, which happens every five years, is the great-granddaughter of Samuel Freeman, who was the brother of Thomas Freeman, an emancipated slave who settled the land on what is now the Berry College Mountain Campus. The Jones, Montgomery, Sanford and Rogers families also lived on the land with the Freemans.
A recent project of the historical society was having a ground penetrating survey done of the Freemantown Cemetery, which is the last remnant of the settlement, by the Historic Preservation Division of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. The survey was conducted in April.
Snipes told the group gathered in the Krannert Center on Saturday morning that she hoped to have the results of the survey ready to share with them, but they will have to wait.
D.L. Henderson, a historian for the Historic South-View Cemetery Preservation Foundation in Atlanta, said the fact there are only a few grave markings in the cemetery speaks to the culture of Freemantown. Instead of gravestones, plants were used to mark graves, a practice rooted in the residents’ African heritage, she said. So it is not that the dead of Freemantown were buried wrong, she continued, rather they were buried in the form of their own tradition.
The Freemantown families went to the site of the cemetery as part of a communal ceremony, pouring libations out on the ground for their ancestors.
“That is sacred ground,” said Henderson, who gave the keynote address during the luncheon at Berry.
Henderson spoke of the social significance the Freemantown Cemetery represents, and what it says of the time it was created, when cemeteries, like society, was segregated based on the color of a person’s skin.
“Cemeteries are microcosms of our society,” Henderson said, adding that how the dead are treated reflects how those living are.
Cemeteries can often be the last remaining piece of a community, a connecting piece to another time when nothing else of it is left, Henderson said.