The Camptown Cemetery in Brenham, Texas was an active African American cemetery in the late 1800s that had since become neglected and overgrown. Over the course of the past several years, a local movement began to restore the cemetery and preserve the valuable history within it.
After hearing about the rich history in the cemetery and the passion of the community members who were working to restore it, I was eager to get involved. With the help of twenty-five undergraduate students in the Texas A&M Geography Society, I led the efforts to create a comprehensive map of the features within the cemetery. The idea was to create a visual representation of the newly restored cemetery for the Brenham community.
Over the course of several weekends throughout the fall of 2016, we collected over 450 points using a Topcon total station. Using ESRI ArcMap, we created a map to represent the above-ground features such as fences, gravestones, and family plots.
Census records have led the cemetery restoration team to believe 196 individuals to have been buried in the cemetery, but there are only approximately 81 grave markers remaining. In an effort to identify potential sites of unmarked graves, we teamed with a group of geophysicists who have done extensive work at the cemetery to collect ground penetrating radar (GPR) data to create a subsurface profile, in which subsurface anomalies could be identified. This data was collected along a 27 m transect that contained a series of visible depressions hypothesized to be unmarked graves.
This research was presented with two other students, Daniel Huseman and Hailey Duncan, at the Texas Geography Student Research Symposium hosted by Texas State University on March 24th, 2017, where we won 2nd Place for Undergraduate Poster. We also presented at the 2017 Texas A&M University Geography Graduate Student Research Symposium and at Texas A&M University Student Research Week in March 2017.
This work has been published in Explorations: The Texas A&M Undergraduate Journal Volume 9. The article was co-written by Hailey Duncan and can be read here.
