LEXINGTON COUNTY, S.C. — St. Michael Lutheran Church set aside Sunday afternoon, Nov. 1, to rededicate a quarter-acre burial ground in northeastern Lexington County where roughly 160 people are buried, many of them enslaved members of the congregation.
The 2 p.m. service at the cemetery, at Windward Point Road and Arwen Lane, was open to descendants, to members of Pleasant Spring AME Church down the road and to families with ties to the land. An organ recital on the church’s restored 1865 Hook organ followed at 3 p.m. at the sanctuary at 400 River Road.
Burials at the site go back to 1814. Researchers have put names to more than 20 of the people buried there, and many other graves are marked only by a stone.
The restoration started in 2017 after Pastor Frank Anderson’s daughter came across the overgrown plot on a run. Volunteers from both churches spent the years since clearing brush, repairing worn headstones and digging into the records. Among the stones they uncovered is one marking July Spence, an enslaved-born man who became a founding elder of Pleasant Spring AME in 1869.
The work drew $40,000 in state funding. Anderson has said the goal is for the site to be understood a century from now as a place marked by both slavery and reconciliation.
