This article has been edited since it first appeared in print.
(From left) Ryan K. Smith, VCU history professor; Stephanie Spera, UR geography and environment professor; Beth Zizzamia, GIS manager for the Spatial Analysis Lab at UR; and photographer Brian Palmer (Photo courtesy University of Richmond)
For more than 100 years, East End Cemetery on the border of Richmond and Henrico County was unprotected from the ravages of nature. While some cemeteries have received funding from the city and state in the past, departed souls in the all-Black East End Cemetery could rely only on their descendants for upkeep and maintenance of their final resting places.
As a result, many graves were unmarked, and underbrush swallowed up those that had been inscribed. In the mid-2010s, a group called Friends of East End formed to clean up the burial ground, and now, a team from the University of Richmond and Virginia Commonwealth University has produced a digital map of previously unknown gravesites at the cemetery using drone technology.
“I came up with the idea of using hydrologic modeling to locate the gravesites,” says Matt Franklin, a former UR student who’s now employed as a Geographic Information Systems specialist with engineering and technology firm Timmons Group. “First, we flew a drone over the cemetery and, using GIS software, identified places where the ground changes in elevation. Then, that information was used to determine where water was likely to pool in these areas.
“We can be reasonably certain that if water tended to pool in an oblong depression, that location was a gravesite.”
Before the effort, 3,300 graves had been identified by Friends of East End. Franklin and his team helped discover as many as 8,000 more unmarked spots. Some 15,000 people are estimated to have been buried at East End, which is adjacent to Colored Paupers and Evergreen cemeteries; Maggie L. Walker, the first Black woman in the U.S. to serve as president of a bank, is buried in the latter.
Stephanie Spera, an assistant professor of geography and the environment at UR, flew the drone used to collect data. “I’m convinced that all the gravesite locations we identified are accurate,” she says. “That said, the data is incomplete. There are some places so overgrown with trees and brush that determining elevation changes was impossible.”
The data was turned over to Friends of East End.
“More than anything, this data demonstrates just how many people are buried here,” Spera says. “It’s very important that people continue to care for this area.”
