NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Bones uncovered at a South Louisiana slave cemetery where black Union veterans were buried after the Civil War will likely be reburied nearby to ensure their reinterment doesn’t disturb other graves in the Kenner Cemetery, federal authorities have announced.
Four-foot-wide signs will give historical information about both cemeteries, each of which held 100 to 150 graves, and the adjacent sugar plantations where they were located.
The corps says both cemeteries date back to the early 1800s and were used until 1928, when the land in St. Charles Parish was bought for the Bonnet Carre Spillway. The spillway’s 1975 opening unearthed bones near a drainage ditch dug in the early 1970s, when the cemeteries’ locations were unknown.
The corps has scheduled a meeting Wednesday at St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church in Destrehan to get comments from descendants of people buried in the graveyards and anyone interested in its proposals for the sites listed in the National Register of Historic Places as the Kenner and Kugler Cemeteries Archaeological District.
The cemeteries were created for the bodies of slaves at Roseland Plantation, owned for decades before and after the Civil War by the Oxley and Kenner families, and Hermitage Plantation, originally created by P.A. Rost and bought in 1890 by George Kugler.
One thing the corps wants to learn is what people whose families are buried there want the new grave’s marker to look like, Corps spokeswoman Rachel Rodi said in an interview Tuesday. Officials also will bring plans for some of the eight signs proposed for the cemeteries and along a road between them.
The signs will be bolted to posts so they can be removed easily before the spillway is opened. Both cemeteries are within the spillway, which was created after the great flood of 1927 as a place to send water that might otherwise spill over or break down Mississippi River levees. The markers and tree plantings will be designed to withstand floods without holding back the water.
One sign states that, in January 1811, plantations in the Bonnet Carre area were the site of North America’s largest slave uprising.
“Hundreds of people defied Louisiana’s slave laws, took up arms, and marched along the River Road past this site, towards New Orleans,” it reads. “They were halted in a battle with local militia. Leaders of the uprising were captured and many were put to death.”
Those leaders may have included one from Roseland. A master’s thesis written in 2008 by Nathan Buman at Louisiana State University states that one named Harry — among a handful of men whom Charles Deslondes called to a meeting on Jan. 5, 1811 to organize the uprising — was owned by “Kenner and Henderson.”
Like most slaves, Harry was known to the whites who wrote about the rebellion only by a given name. When white people assigned a surname to a slave it was — like Charles Deslondes’ “family” name — usually the owner’s.
The sign designed for the Kenner Cemetery bears a photograph of a tombstone found there and bearing the words “Moses Ray, Co. H., U.S.C.” The “C” designated “colored” U.S. troops, three regiments of which were raised in New Orleans in 1862.
The sign also states that sugar was grown at Roseland’s site until about 1920.
The corps commissioned a study in 1985 to find the cemeteries and to talk to people whose families had been buried or lived there. It set up buffer zones to keep ATV riders from zooming through the cemeteries, and had low areas filled in and water flows routed away to avoid further erosion.
The cemeteries were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987.
The spillway was among projects started after the 1927 flood killed hundreds of people in seven states, including many around New Orleans.
It was opened last year because of floods and also in 2010 in an attempt to keep oil from the BP PLC spill from getting into Louisiana waterways. Those openings did not expose any remains, Rodi said.
___(equals)
Online:
U.S. Archives about black troops in the Civil War: http://1.usa.gov/d9N0bE
Spillway master plan:
http://www.mvn.usace.army.mil/recreation/rec_bonnetcarre.asp
 
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.
 
 
—-
Contact The Daily Reveille’s news staff at [email protected]