Telling Truthful History

In Winterpock, Virginia on a thickly wooded plot of land lies a burial ground where enslaved and formerly enslaved people were interred from the early 1850s to at least the 1930s. The land where the cemetery is situated once belonged to James Henry Cox (1810-1877), owner of the Clover Hill Mining Company, enslaver, and Harris's great-great-grandfather--whom she has researched as part of an extended project looking at her family's past as enslavers in the American South. The cemetery is on land now belonging to Vulcan Materials Corps. To date, only two of those buried in the cemetery have been identified: Jennie Haskins Patterson (c. 1842-1938) and her husband Edward Patterson (c. 1835-1937). 

During a 2023 site visit, archaeologist Joanna Green with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources authenticated the burial ground and estimated that it may contain as many as thirty graves. Since 2022, efforts to preserve this neglected cemetery have been underway, led by the African American History Committee of the Chesterfield Historical Society of Virginia, members of the descendant community together with Harris and residents of Chesterfield County. The current preservation plan includes the transfer of the cemetery from Vulcan to Tabernacle Baptist Church, which has historic ties to Winterpock's enslaved community. The cemetery is now listed on the national Black Cemetery Network. To read more about this and the project and the Haskins-Patterson family, read the publication.