At St. Mary’s Cemetery in Howard County, a project is underway to revitalize the final resting place of enslaved people.
The 3.2-acre Catholic burial ground was once associated with Doughoregan Manor, a pre-colonial manor built in the early 1700s owned by the Carroll family. Deacon Allen Greene of the Church of the Resurrection in Ellicott City is spearheading the effort to restore the cemetery, especially after learning he has ancestors buried there.
“The more I got to digging around and looking at the burial records, I realized an ancestor of mine was buried there,” he said. “That was it for me. I felt a sense of obligation to dig in and do what I could to help restore the area.”
According to church records from St. Louis in Clarksville, there are at least 163 burials in the cemetery, with at least 61 of them Black Americans who were likely servants or enslaved people who worked at the manor.
Deacon Greene credited two local Girl Scouts, Sarah Hill and Nadia Klementsen, for bringing attention to the neglected cemetery while working on their silver award project. The cemetery has been virtually untouched since 1991, he said.
“Imagine an area that hasn’t been touched in more than 30 years,” he said. “There will have to be a clean-up in order to clean up the weeds and all the underbrush.”
Being overrun by nature only compounds the already-daunting task of locating any burial sites, as many of the graves are unmarked or missing headstones.
“We need to go through the site and identify where people have been buried,” Deacon Greene said. “That’s one of the first steps, in addition to clearing out the underbrush. Once we’ve done that, we would look to honor those individual sites. Then it’s going to be up to the county, as far as ongoing upkeep. We hope in the coming months to get the grave sites detected and recorded with the assistance of ground-penetrating
radar.”
To assist with all those goals, Howard County, the legal owner of the property, has applied for a grant through the African American Heritage Preservation Program. Jenny Kraska, executive director of the Annapolis-based Maryland Catholic Conference, has been an aid in that process since Deacon Greene reached out to her after learning about how Kraska assisted a church in Bowie where enslaved people were buried in its cemetery.
“Anything we can do to help communities that are willing to preserve their heritage and those sacred spaces, we should do whatever we can to help that process along,” Kraska said. “It’s the right thing to do and they deserve that respect and that acknowledgement.”
Howard County Executive Calvin Ball said in a written statement that the preservation and conservation of the historically segregated Black cemetery “will not only serve as a model for the treatment of other similar sites, but it will also afford us the opportunity to gain perspective, resilience and knowledge to help shape our present and future.” The project will “further allow us to memorialize our ancestors and show them the respect they so dutifully deserve,” he added.
Hill, a senior at Marriotts Ridge High School in Marriottsville who is one of the Girl Scouts working on the cleanup effort, said it angered her to see the burial site overgrown. She is determined to work on restoring the grounds even if it extends beyond her Girl Scout project.
“I want to make sure that this cemetery is mapped and has a pathway – a proper way to access and reach headstones,” said the parishioner of St. John the Evangelist in Columbia.
As important as this project is to Deacon Greene, he thinks it is just as important to the African-American community. To him, the cemetery is a reminder of the past and should be honored for that historical significance.
“As this county continues to diversify, increasing its vibrancy and growth, we should remember its past,” he said. “It’s important that landmarks like St. Mary’s Cemetery don’t become the underbrush of this nation’s history, but its foundation. Although I would hope it’s important to all Americans, to the African American community, it represents an important part of our journey in this nation. We should honor those who preceded us, and indeed those interned at St. Mary’s represent that.”
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