Van Winkle's Mill Archaeological Project

3BE652: The African-American Cemetery

Of the various known historical accounts regarding Van Hollow, only one mentions the existence of a slave cemetery.

In a short article a 77 year-old woman referred to as Mrs. Homer Yeager (Bertha Blackburn Yeager), who was born at Van Winkle's Mill in 1886 and spent a good deal of her childhood in the hollow, recounts to Martha Sherwood Johnson seemingly random memories of her life at Van Winkle and nearby War Eagle Mill. One of these memories is a ghost story she heard and its association with the graveyard:

She tells, among her reminiscences, how frightened she was of the old Negro graveyard near her home at Van Winkle, where the Van Winkle slaves were buried. And she remembers hearing the story of a slave named Peter, a Van Winkle slave, who had come into the gift of a swallow tail coat, of which he was so proud that he wore it even at work in the mill. One day at the Mill, so she was told, the tails of Peter's fancy coat caught in the big saw, he was drawn into it, and, as she heard it, "made into a terrible sight." He is buried in the old slave cemetery, too. (M. S. Johnson 1963:33).

The cemetery is given more detail in another article. Blanch Elliot, the long-time resident of War Eagle Mill who helped launch the War Eagle Crafts Fair in 1954 and who has authored several articles on Van Winkle's Mill herself, relates information to a staff reporter from The Springdale News.

Mrs. Elliot, who is a history buff, recalls her and her husband's visits to the Negro slave burial grounds. She commented that when they visited the grave site, there were remnants of barbed wire strands embedded in trees and depressions in the ground and also huge trees growing in what had been an enclosure.

"It is possible that if a person ventured to the grave site today, he would find only a weed-infested, hidden plot of ground," Mrs. Elliott said (Edminsten 1969).

Efforts to locate this feature during the preliminary mapping project failed, however. In 1998 State Parks personnel, following information passed on by a local hunter, found a possible location for the cemetery atop the hill located to the west of the worker's quarters chimney fall (Feature 9). The cemetery consisted of four possible grave markers two sets of paired, upright fieldstones in east-west alignment. The "remnants of barbed wire strands embedded in trees" were also observed, although this is not an uncommon occurrence in the area.

Graden Terrace ca. 1870. In 1999, a small, shallow trench was excavated across and perpendicular to the area demarcated by the stones in order to verify that they were, in fact, human graves. No artifacts or human remains were observed during excavation as trenches were designed to be shallow enough only to detect soil staining. Although no feature stains were noted during excavation (probably due to upland organic leeching), slight slumping or dips in the soil profile aligned with the gravestones offered circumstantial evidence for the grave shafts.

The suspected African-American cemetery was given a separate state site number (3BE652). This was done in order to maximize protection against potential cemetery vandals and to aid in future preservation efforts.

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