The UNC Commission on History, Race and a Way Forward is working together with the Kenan-Flagler Business School to honor enslaved people buried in the Barbee Cemetery.
Located behind the Rizzo Center in Meadowmont the former Barbee plantation has been undisturbed for decades. The Barbee family cemetery, one of the remaining aspects of the original plantation, houses 120 graves.
Brandon Bayne, an associate professor of religious studies at UNC, said while some of those graves are marked many are not.
“There are about 20 graves that are all close to where the Barbee family house was together on the top of the hill,” Bayne said. “The other 100 are kind of on an incline as that hill kind of moves down into a ravine and to the creek that is just to the east there.”
The 20 graves on the hilltop are likely family members with two still marked to William Barbee and his wife who owned the property for the first half of the 19th century.
“What you don’t learn is that those other 100 are likely enslaved people that worked for the Barbees on their plantation,” Bayne said.
One of the problems with unmarked graves is the lack of certainty on who is buried where. The graves were sometimes marked with stones, flowers, or wood – but many of those are untraceable now to their origins.
Archeological records can help locate the graves of enslaved people based on previous patterns in the South, indicating only family members were buried on the peaks of hills.
Through the partnership of UNC’s Commission on History, Race and a Way Forward and the Kenan-Flagler Business school there is a lengthy process to develop appropriate signage of the cemetery and marking who the graves belong to. Bayne said there is more to do in the community in preserving the stories which helped shape Southern Orange County.
“I also think this wider effort of recovering the stories that are in our community to oral history,” Bayne said. “I know that the Center for the Study of American South and some of my colleagues have begun this work of asking these questions and reaching out and getting into contact with folks in our community that know these stories.”
The Barbee family donated 221 acres of land to the university in 1792, where Polk Place through Rosemary Street currently stand.
Photo via UNC
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