Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU), the first public supported historically black university (HBCU) in Texas, was established on Alta Vista, the former enslaved labor camp of Colonel Jared Ellison Kirby, who, in 1860, after a decade of steady accumulation, had perhaps become the wealthiest resident in then-Austin County. Just before the Civil War, Kirby owned more than 8,000 acres worth $285,000, and $175,000 in personal property, including 139 enslaved men and women. According to oral tradition, Kirby set aside some land as a burial site for the enslaved from both Alta Vista and Liendo, an enslaved labor camp owned by Kirby's cousin, Leonard Waller Groce. Hundreds of unmarked graves on the edge of campus are believed to date to the antebellum period, but African Americans continued to use the cemetery after Kirby's widow, Helen Marr Swearingen Kirby, deeded the plantation to the state in 1876 for the establishment of PVAMU. Later, it became associated with and named for Wyatt Chapel, a nearby African American church. Based on slave schedules, Wyatt Chapel Community Cemetery might contain the graves of over 2,000 of the enslaved, formerly enslaved, descendants of the enslaved, and other itinerant workers. No one made a formal record of these burials, however, and the historic burial ground, which is located behind University Village Phase III, was over time abandoned, especially after 1961, with the establishment of nearby Prairie View Memorial Gardens. While the cemetery contains only a handful of marked graves, we have recently discovered a host of death certificates that prove the cemetery contains veterans of World Wars I and II, former slaves and their descendants, and local pastor George Wyatt, who represented Waller County in the state legislature in the 1880s.

In the early 1990s, the state of Texas erected a historical marker on the road closest to the cemetery, but the site became conspicuous for the dumping of trash and non-disposable debris leading up to the summer of 2007, when participants in a graduate course at Rice University and PVAMU acquired global positioning systems and ground-penetrating radar to prove that such equipment could be used to locate lost graves. Over the next few years, graduate students from Rice University followed up on these efforts and noted hundreds of "anomalies" on the surface of the ground. Yet, Rice did not complete their study of the cemetery, and many questions remain about the actual boundaries of the burial ground as well as the number of internments on site.

From the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, the Annual Slave Cemetery Trek—hosted by the Division of Social Work, Behavioral and Political Science and covered in the student newspaper, The Prairie View Panther—made sure that students at Prairie View A&M University learned about Wyatt Chapel Community Cemetery and the institutional history of the university.

Dr. Howard Jones and Dr. Kevin Washington led groups of students to the slave cemetery “on a journey into history and a journey into the spirit,” and they explained:

The old burial ground, which sits on the backside of campus, is perhaps our oldest historic site on campus. Students, alumni, and faculty at PVAMU must have respect for all internments of Wyatt Chapel. Please! Visit the site! Pay some respect to the ancestors!”

In several articles in the school newspaper, students exclaim that “there needs to be an understanding that while we are here doing what we are doing, there were others who came before us that worked diligently to produce the opportunities that we have at the present time.”

The disappointing fact, however, is that the Annual Slave Cemetery Trek ended sometime after the new millennium. Whereas students once cared about the litter and beer cans choking the life of cemeteries, the lack of perpetual cemetery maintenance made cleanups difficult for the cemetery. Styrofoam containers and other trash, which serves as “painful evidence of the lack of respect and understanding,” was piled up on the other side of the fence. The burial ground sits on university-owned land, and it receives a trim every year in December from the maintenance workers at PVAMU.

Lastly, Gregory Bevels, a former student and reporter for the Prairie View Panther, agreed with Jackson and exhorted, “Without the efforts of those individuals held as slaves, whose blood, sweat, and tears have been poured into the land we walk on each day, this university might not have become a reality. The individuals buried in the Wyatt Chapel cemetery are truly gone. What are the students and faculty of Prairie View A&M University going to do in order to make sure they are not forgotten?”

By hiring a remote sensing firm to conduct an archaeological study of Wyatt Chapel Community Cemetery, and by inviting landscape architect Azzurra Cox to develop a landscape design concept for a memorial park and outdoor history museum, this grant project will provide the foundations for many future student-engaged public history projects and reparative justice initiatives at PVAMU.

On one hand, Wyatt Chapel Community Cemetery is about the past buried in it, but it also has an innate orientation towards the future. The extant grave markers beckon us to read them and remember. They speak to the hopes of the formerly enslaved and their ancestors. Yet, the burial ground is an inherent site of transition — a gateway between past and present, life and death, material and spiritual, earth and heaven. Perhaps more than any other site on campus, it communicates the powerful communal and spiritual values that underscore the lived experiences of African Americans. The cemetery also tells the story of the university and its connection to plantation slavery, segregation, disfranchisement, and the struggle for racial equality.

One vision for Wyatt Chapel Community Cemetery is to leave much of what’s there intact, to edit the landscape and work with it. The decline of the cemetery is rooted in systemic racism, which limited the accumulation of black wealth and agency, and the cemetery’s restoration should reflect that history. It’s not about going back to what it looked like in 1921, at the time Rev. George Wyatt was most likely buried inside the metal fence enclosure. Rather, the restoration is about hope for the future. It’s about redressing the legacy of slavery, allowing the interments buried in unmarked graves and their descendants to speak for themselves—to educate and inspire the students still fighting for voting and civil rights in Waller County.

To realize this vision, a hybrid landscape would allow for a variety of treatments from maintaining what's there to newly created memorialization, which allows the cemetery to stay relevant over time. The trees noted in the Rice University study of the cemetery would serve as a new public entrance and undergo a useful transformation into an orchard, or a field for growing food — any sort of active use that would attract visitors. The main section would remain a prairie landscape, and the wilder parts further back would remain forested. At the end of a Texas winter, vines will blend into trees and create enclosed pathways in the rear sections of burial ground, retaining something of a Southern Gothic aesthetic. During warmer seasons, the trees will shade the paths, and the birds will sing, and you might even forget for a moment that you stand amidst the unmarked graves of slaves. Indeed, the wildest, most unkempt parts of the cemetery can also be the most sublime. Now, imagine other parts of Wyatt Chapel Community Cemetery fully restored to create a series of outdoor settings, complete with sculpture and monuments that recalibrate the center of institutional history at PVAMU as well as the local history of Waller County to include those who have too often been denied historical recognition.

Dr. Nesta Anderson's scope of work includes 1) acquisition costs for the Antiquities Permit, 2) costs for hiring students, alumni, and community volunteers to conduct the pedestrian survey, 3) costs for two distinct, yet related, Ground Penetrating Radar investigations, and 4) curation and reporting.

The proposed scope of work of Azzurra Cox includes 1) preliminary research costs, travel, 2) lodging for several days, and 3) concept development for an outdoor museum.

Task 1. Antiquities Permit Acquisition (Summer 2022)
Prior to initiating fieldwork, the Principal Investigator will prepare a research design and obtain an Antiquities Permit from the Texas Historical Commission (THC). The research design will detail the project approach and proposed methods for archaeological pedestrian survey and GPR investigations. Archaeologists will also consult the THC’s online Texas Archeological Sites Atlas to identify previously recorded archaeological sites, surveys, and designated historic properties located within 0.25 kilometers (km) of the project area. This data, along with soils and geology for the project area, will be included in the research design accompanying the permit application.

Task 2. Archaeological Pedestrian Survey (September 5-7, 2022)
The archaeologists will lead a team of student volunteers in an intensive pedestrian survey of the project area, anticipated to cover 3-5 acres in size. Archaeologists will work with small groups of students to teach them basic pedestrian survey techniques. The field team will walk the project area in transects spaced 30 meters (m) apart, looking for evidence of grave markers, grave tending materials, depressions, or other potential indicators of the presence of burials. These features will be marked with pin flags and then mapped with a handheld Trimble GPS unit. No artifacts will be collected as part of this effort, but grave markers and potential grave tending artifacts will be photographed in the field.

Archaeologists will also work with students to record the Wyatt Chapel Community Cemetery as an archaeological site, which will provide it with a state-registered trinomial. Students will work with archaeologists to record the burial ground in the field as a TexSite form. We will submit contact the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory (TARL) in Austin to obtain the trinomial.

Task 3. Ground Penetrating Radar Survey (September 8-9, 2022)
Based on the results of the pedestrian survey, Dr. Anderson will work with us to select an area for GPR survey to locate burials and/or establish cemetery boundaries. Since it is anticipated the pedestrian survey could expand the potential boundaries of the cemetery, the GPR survey will be limited to a sample of 1 acre. This sample will allow investigators to review data to assess the success of GPR in delineating both boundaries and burial locations before investigating the entirety of an area that could prove to be much larger than expected and may require additional resources. In addition, while previous GPR work appears to have been successful in identifying burials within the cemetery, the current investigation will need to replicate these results. Results can vary according to the amount of moisture in the soil, the type of burial container, whether a burial container is present, whether grave goods are present, and the types of sediments present surrounding the burial. Sampling provides an opportunity to gather additional data at a later date if the work is successful, to obtain additional funding if the cemetery appears to be much larger than expected, and/or to revisit the site with a different methodology if the results are inconclusive.

A suite of geophysical techniques, including a fluxgate gradiometer and GPR will be used to help locate unmarked graves. A grid at the sites will be established using an RTK (sub-centimeter) GNSS system or a Robotic Total Data Station (TDS). All anomalies with archaeological significance will be located on the ground using the RTK GNSS. Given the possible presence of clay soils, using a suite of geophysical instruments is recommended. A magnetometer survey will be added to this survey for no additional charge to help increase the potential of a successful survey.

Gradiometer data will be collected at 0.5 meter traverse interval and 10 hz sample interval resulting in approximately 20 readings per m2. GPR data will be collected using a 400 Mhz dipole antenna at a 0.5 m traverse interval. Non-magnetic markers will mark the corners of the grids and flags will be placed along the top and bottom of the grids. All grid corners will be recorded with a sub-centimeter RTK GNSS.

All data will be processed and filtered to remove extraneous false readings (spikes and drop-outs). Data sets will be processed to enhance the legibility of the target features through statistical manipulation of the recorded data as well as through image processing of the image file output. Benchmarks, corner stakes, and impediments in the collection area (i.e. trees, buildings, areas not collected) will be labelled on output images.

Task 4. Reporting (October 2022)
Following the completion of fieldwork and analysis, PaleoWest will prepare a draft report of findings for submission the Texas Historical Commission (THC). This report will contain the results of the pedestrian survey and GPR. Maps will depict the locations of potential burials, grave markers and grave tending goods located during the survey, and the GPR results will include locations of all anomalies interpreted at possible unmarked graves. The locations of these anomalies will be marked in the field using survey grade RTK GNSS (<1 cm accuracy). Once the report has been approved, PaleoWest will produce the required number of reports and provide them to the appropriate agencies.

Task 5. Curation (November 2022)
Nesta and her team will prepare all documents for curation as required by the Antiquities Permit. After we finish our pedestrian survey and the GPR, Nesta will also transport copies of all paperwork to her Austin office. Upon draft report acceptance at the THC, she will design and publish the final report with Summerlee as well as make suggestions for long-term maintenance to PVAMU.

Table 1. Cost Estimate for Archaeological Study

Task 1. Antiquities Permit Acquisition $680
Task 2. Archaeological Pedestrian Survey $1,640
Task 3. Ground Penetrating Radar Survey $5,760
Task 4. Report $5,260
Task 5. Curation $150
Direct Expenses $1,701

SUBTOTAL (Nesta) - $15,191

Table 2. Cost Estimate, Azzurra Cox
(October-December 2022)

Deliverables--A research booklet including site documentation, preliminary research files, concept sketches, and three concept plans

Task 1 - Preliminary/Pre-Site Visit Research - $600
Task 2 - Site Visit (Two days) includes travel, on-site research, walking tour development, and several meetings with descendants and our students - $1,750
Task 3 - In the development stage, Azzurra will conduct a post-site visit analysis of her data, and she will develop a concept plan - $2,400

Azzurra SUBTOTAL - $4,750

GRAND TOTAL $19,941

Perpetual maintenance of the cemetery and systematic study will be the most important immediate outcomes on the project, but landscape architecture and memorialization will be crucial to the perpetual maintenance of the burial ground. In this vision, landscape design becomes a crucial element of not only preservation strategy but also student activism and community development. The transformation of Wyatt Chapel Community Cemetery into a memorial park and outdoor history museum will connect past struggles to the current movement for voting rights. As a site of conscience, it can turn memory into action. By showcasing the different landscapes that developed over the years, and highlighting the sporadic maintenance efforts of students and volunteers, it departs drastically from the preservation strategies at other forlorn and forgotten African American burial grounds, and it offers a more transformative vision of the future, one that more closely aligns with the vision of Dr. Melanye Price, Dean Dorie Gilbert, and President Ruth Simmons for the future of the university.

Project Team

Dr. Melanye Price
As director of the Ruth J. Simmons Center for Race & Justice, Dr. Price plans to coordinate with the university to maintain the site and remove piles of trash from burial ground for the second stage of the project. Dr. Price also coordinated meetings with descendants and the community.

Dr. Marco Robinson
As assistant director of the Ruth J. Simmons Center for Race & Justice, Dr. Robinson secured the participation of former PVAMU mayor Frank Jackson, coordinated meetings with the descendants of Jared Ellison Kirby, and assisted with the crucial participation of students.

Kristy Bradford
As coordinator of the Ruth J. Simmons Center for Race & Justice, Ms. Bradford will help administer the grant and pay our consultants.

Phyllis Earles
As the University Archivist at PVAMU and the official steward of institutional history, Ms. Earles has provided crucial contextual information about the cemetery, and she helped to develop our relationship with the Summerlee Foundation.

Kimberly Karol
As the director of stewardship and development communications at PVAMU, Ms. Karol initiated contact with the Summerlee Foundation and laid a strong foundation for our relationship with the private foundation.

Bea Emanuel-Sims
As the Major Gift Officer at PVAMU, Ms. Emanuel-Sims helped to curate the grant proposal to the Summerlee Foundation in the fall of 2021.

Lisa Stafford
As community liaison and Special Collections Librarian at PVAMU, Ms. Stafford has provided critical insight into responsible professional practice and helped coordinate meetings with the community.

Project Leaders

Dr. Nesta Anderson
As Principal Investigator on this project, co-founder of Legacy Cultural Resources, LLC, and the former leader of PaleoWest’s Austin, Texas, office, Dr. Anderson brings almost 30 years of cultural resource management experience to her clients. She previously served as a Program Manager for Pape-Dawson Engineers and Atkins in Texas. Using her extensive private and public sector network, Nesta recently started one of the leading cultural and heritage resources firms in Texas. Click HERE for more information.

Dr. Melanie Nichols
As Co-Principal Investigator on this project, Dr. Nichols is the co-founder of Legacy Cultural Resources, LLC. She visited the site with Dr. Nesta Anderson In February 2022 to determine the scope of work on the project.

Dr. DeWayne Moore
As Co-Principal Investigator, Dr. Moore is an Assistant Professor of U.S. and Public History at PVAMU. He holds a master’s degree in historic preservation and archival administration from Middle Tennessee State University, where he worked as a digital media strategist at the Center for Popular Music, the Albert Gore Sr. Archives, and the James Walker Library. He earned his Ph.D. in African American history at the University of Mississippi, where he worked as an archival research specialist for the Blues Archive and the Burns Belfry African American History Museum. He has published peer-reviewed articles in the Association for Recorded Sound Collections Journal, The Public Historian, and UNC-Chapel Hill’s Southern Cultures journal, and he has organized undergraduate and community-engaged research projects as the executive director of the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund, a historical consulting firm that erects memorials for blues artists and maintains abandoned cemeteries in the US South. Click HERE for more information.

Azzurra Cox
Ms. Cox comes to landscape architecture by way of her love of cities and her commitment to public space. She infuses her interest in social theory and the humanities into her landscape design work, and she believes in the power of landscape to shape and reflect collective social narratives. Cox brings a range of experiences in the worlds of design activism, publishing, and curation to her work, and she was named the 2016 National Olmsted Scholar by the Landscape Architecture Foundation for her research on African American cultural landscapes in St. Louis. Azzurra holds an MLA from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a BA in Social Studies from Harvard College. Azzurra is an Associate at Seattle-based GGN and serves as Urban Design Commissioner on the Seattle Design Commission, reviewing all city capital-improvement projects. Click HERE for more information.

Dr. Chet Walker
As the ground penetrating radar specialist, Dr. Walker brings over 20 years of experience in the field of archaeology and has been involved with projects in North, South, and Central America, the Pacific, and Europe. He has authored or co-authored publications and/or technical reports on research in eight countries and 21 states, and he has worked for academic institutions and private cultural resource firms. In the spring of 2006, Dr. Walker founded Archaeo-Geophysical Associates, LLC, an archaeological consulting firm specializing in geophysical prospection, he has collected geophysical data on over 145 archaeological sites totaling 1,539 Acres of Gradiometer, 115 Acres of Ground-Penetrating Radar, and 484 Acres of Electromagnetic Induction Meter.