Students map graves in Nacogdoches cemetery By AP Tuesday, December 2, 2008 NACOGDOCHES, Texas (AP) - Faculty from the Stephen F. Austin geology department and archaeology department, as well as students representing the geography club, sociology club and anthropology club, have spent the last month and a half locating unmarked graves in a 100-year old cemetery near downtown. The Zion Hill Cemetery, associated with the Zion Hill Baptist Church, was first established in the late 19th century. The cemetery was vandalized and began to fall into disrepair following World War II, according to Jeff Roth, an SFA professor of geology who is working on the project. The city assumed custodianship of the cemetery a few decades later, but it continued to be neglected. "The city came through in the late 60s or early 70s and channelized the creek and cut (Park Street) through the cemetery," Roth said. "So a 2-acre cemetery was whittled down into the little postage stamp it is today. Now it's just a little bit less than a half acre." Roth said the Zion Hill Cemetery is in an area that was once a segregated neighborhood in Nacogdoches. He said he hopes the research and restoration will keep a part of Nacogdoches history from fading away. "We're losing the historical context of the cemetery, and we're trying to bring that into the current memory. We're trying to show that there was a significant African American presence here," Roth said. "All of those memories are starting to slip away." Roth said a generational shift has made it difficult for young people to imagine life in segregated America. "Even landscapes of the dead were segregated. Funeral homes were segregated. I think that opens up some minds and shows what segregation was all about." he said. "Even in death, we segregated ourselves." Roth said he will make a presentation about the project at an academic anthropology conference in the spring. Part of the presentation will discuss how to involve college students with service projects. SFA student volunteers said the research into the cemetery helped them better understand a part of Nacogdoches history that is rarely discussed. "The cemetery's history is something that has kind of been covered up. Nobody really talks about it," Jenna Smith, a junior history major, said. "I couldn't believe the city of Nacogdoches did something like this. I could never imagine just plowing through peoples' graves." Roth and Dr. Leslie Cecil, an SFA professor of anthropology, estimate that there are around 40 unmarked graves in addition to the 30 or so marked graves in the cemetery. Roth speculated that there could be unmarked graves directly beneath Park Street, which currently runs through the original land owned by the Zion Hill Baptist Church. Cecil is in charge of the technology used in locating the unmarked plots. She and her student volunteers used an electromagnetic ground-penetrating radar that reads varying soil densities as deep as 9 meters underground. The earliest marked headstone in the cemetery dates back to Feb. 8, 1897, and the most recent remaining headstone belongs to Charley Blakey, who died in 1945. According to the historical marker in front of the cemetery, the cemetery is the final resting place for John B. Liggins, Amiel Rivers and Jim Smith, three Nacogdoches men who served in World War I. "The burial ground remains a chronicle of the African American pioneers of Nacogdoches," the historical marker reads. C 2008 The E.W. Scripps Co.