Finding the African American cemetery can be difficult. It lies across the railroad tracks in a thickly wooded area.

Many are unaware that this site exists. The burials all took place in the nineteenth century, with the dates on the stones ranging from 1863 to 1899. Four out of the five people identified here by their tombstones are members of the Craig family. They are most likely the relatives of Sall Craig, the slave who ran away in 1828. Other members of the family, including James, Eliza, and Lucy Craig, were also slaves at Fort Hunter.

 The gravestones of Andrew Craig (left) and Amelia Surls (far right) have been damaged by vandals who apparently shot at them with firearms. Click here for a closer look at Andrew Craig's stone.

The people buried in this cemetery are not confirmed to have ever been slaves, though it is likely that Andrew Craig, born in 1795, was registered as a slave until age 28. Andrew's son Leonard P. Craig recalled that his father "was bound out to a man by the name of Carson McCallister [sic] and worked on the farm until he was 21, when he continued to do farm work," adding that it was Mr. McAllister who "gave a plot of land for burial purposes to my father." Leonard served in the 2nd U.S. Colored Cavalry during the Civil War and went on to become quite successful as a local railroad foreman.

Andrew and his wife Rachel are buried here as well as their grandson Andrew E. Craig and daughter-in-law Amelia (Leonard's son and first wife). George Washington Pratt is the only person whose gravestone does not bear the Craig family name. According to his tombstone, he was killed by a train when he was eight years old.

Two of the graves are unmarked. One stone has no markings and the other is a base without a stone. These are probably the final resting places of Cyrus Craig and John Craig, two of Andrew and Rachel’s children.

A diagram of the cemetery can be viewed here.

The cemeteries at Fort Hunter follow a somewhat similar pattern to those on some southern plantations. Slaves and their owners were often buried in separate areas, with the slave cemetery in a more remote and overgrown location, such as this one. The people in this cemetery are all buried facing east, which was a common nineteenth century African American burial practice.

It is possible that there are other unmarked graves nearby. A recently discovered newspaper clipping from around 1950 reports on the Craig family cemetery and notes that local residents "remember an old slave cemetery adjacent to this tiny graveyard in which the graves were marked by the names, 'Tom,' 'Daniel,' etc., cut into rough field stone rocks strewn naturally about the terrain," though searches at the time failed to locate the stones that may have been lost due to the expansion of the railroad.