It’s barely 10 a.m., but our group of seven is sweating under the Virginia sun.
I’ve got to keep my sleeves rolled down to prevent tick attacks and to protect against the poison ivy and poison oak that grows thick and tangled in these woods.
As the thermometer inches toward 90, my Norman cousins, spouses and I step carefully over uneven ground and fight overgrown vegetation to search for evidence of centuries-old family graves.
Our Norman ancestors once owned these bean fields and forest in Stevensburg, about 70 miles southwest of Washington, D.C., and the enslaved people who worked their land.
How do we know what we’re doing?
Enter Jim Bish of the nearby historic town of Culpeper (population 20,000).
A retired, award-winning American history teacher of 30 years, history tour guide and author of “I Can’t Tell A Lie: Parson Weems and The Truth About George Washington’s Cherry Tree, Prayer at Valley Forge, and Other Anecdotes,” Bish co-founded the Culpeper County Cemetery Project. Members identify, document and protect the county’s 70-plus cemeteries.
“I’m just a local historian trying to preserve local history and work with planning offices to assure that local history and historical artifacts are protected,” he says.
Bish and co-volunteer Wayne Wildgrube researched pertinent documents and the location of the Norman cemetery before our arrival. Today, Bish explains how finding centuries-old graves is facilitated by a ground probe that measures depth and soil pressure.
“If the soil has never been touched, it’s compacted pretty hard. If it’s been removed to put in a coffin, the soil is much looser, even a couple of hundred years later.”
As we push through the heavy growth, we begin to uncover what looks like fieldstones — flat, squarish stones collected from nearby fields and used as grave markers. Uneven ground and the presence of boxwood, a thick shrub used in the South to create barriers around homes and graveyards, also indicate that we probably are in the right area and that this probably is the ancestral cemetery.
And, according to cousin-researcher David Norman of Winston-Salem, N.C., “…many of the slaves from earlier generations (who lived on this piece of land) were also buried in this cemetery site.”
This is but one day of our four-day visit to the Virginia towns of Culpeper, Orange, Gordonsville and Stevensburg.
Exploring the area has been a journey into early Colonial life, the formation of the United States and the normalization of slavery. Visiting these historic sites brings home slavery’s impact on the social, cultural, economic and political life of our country, and the personal toll it has exacted on enslaved people and their progeny.
There is a lot to see in this history-saturated area of the country, and we only scratch the surface with our visit to the Exchange Hotel & Civil War Medical Museum in Gordonsville, which once served as a Civil War hospital that treated 70.000 Union and Confederate soldiers. Today, museum exhibits demonstrate the gruesome state of medicine and wartime surgery in the 1860s.
Side story: When the Exchange Hotel was a passenger stop for trains on the Virginia Central and Orange & Alexandria railroads, enterprising African-American women sold fried chicken to passengers who reached from the train windows for the platters of chicken carried on the women’s heads.
We make another stop at Stevensburg’s Salubria, a 1757 plantation home built in the Georgian style. It was constructed by both free artisans and enslaved people at the direction of its owner, the local church rector. A list of some of the names of the enslaved who lived and worked here is exhibited at the entry, and the home’s large, empty, paneled rooms echo with history.
A touch of irony: The plantation’s name – Salubria – is Latin for health.
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