Archaeologists, blessed by community prayers and a reading from scripture, began to excavate graves this week at the lost site of the original First Baptist Church in Colonial Williamsburg, one of the oldest Black churches in the country.
Forty-one grave shafts have now been discovered at the site of the church, which was torn down in 1955 and covered by a parking lot because it didn’t fit the town’s Colonial motif.
If bones are found, they could reveal information about a person’s height, age at death, illnesses, quality of life and place of origin, according to the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. And the DNA could provide a link to living descendants.of the work at the site.One of the graves has an inverted wine bottle at one end of the shaft and is believed to be the oldest in the cemetery. It probably dates to the 1850s or before, he said.
The grave with the inverted bottle — burial 26 — will be examined last because it is partially underneath the brick foundation of a church that was built on the spot in 1856, Gary said.“You can see it easily,” he said. It’s not mingled with other graves. In other parts of the site, the dead have been buried on top of or right beside one another, he said.“We didn’t want to get into a situation where we’ve got more than one person in the burial,” he said.
By 1818 a “Baptist meeting house” of unknown design was on the Nassau Street site. In 1856, a new brick church was built with a steeple and Palladian windows, and stood for a century.But in the mid-1900s, as Colonial Williamsburg was being made into an 18th-century historic site, a 19th-century Black church didn’t fit that narrative, even though more than half the town’s residents in 1775 were Black, most of them enslaved.
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