LEXINGTON COUNTY, S.C. — A long-neglected burial ground for enslaved people in Lexington County was formally rededicated Sunday after close to 10 years of volunteer work by two neighboring congregations.
St. Michael Lutheran Church and Pleasant Spring AME Church held a worship service, a concert and a reception at the St. Michael African American Cemetery, drawing descendants of those buried there along with church members and neighbors.
The graveyard sits on Windward Point Road and went largely unused after about 1920. Black residents of the area buried their dead there from 1814 to 1922, and an archaeological survey counted more than 160 graves. Many have no headstone at all, and others carry only initials or a first name carved by family members.
No written records of the cemetery exist, so volunteers from both churches and from the University of South Carolina spent years clearing brush and resetting stones, many now braced with metal supports. Among those buried is July Spence, one of the founding trustees of Pleasant Spring, which formerly enslaved people founded in 1869.
The Lutheran congregation dates to the early 1800s, and parish records from the 1830s list enslaved worshippers who sat in a balcony reached through a separate door.
