Volunteers can join the work Saturday to restore the Seay Chapel and its surrounding historic grounds in Alexandria with approximately 500 unmarked graves.
Friends of Alexandria Historic Cemeteries District Co-Chair Kristina Wheeler said the site is a designated historic district that contains some of the earliest burials in DeKalb County. Wheeler said the location is home to one of the largest African-American cemeteries in the county and features a rockstone church built in the 1930s.
“It was quite impactful,” Wheeler said. “It really after spending the last year researching the families and their journeys and their different lines and the descendants and that, it’s it’s paying homage and tribute to the souls that are gone.”
Wheeler said the African-American section of the cemetery includes individuals who lived in the area before DeKalb County was established in 1837. Wheeler said many of those buried on the hill were enslaved, and their descendants often returned to the family plots for burial even after moving to other states.
“When we’re chasing our family history, it’s really easy for people to kind of get caught up in the census records and people want, you know, oh that famous ancestor, but the people that are buried there are the ones that helped build the area in Alexandria,” Wheeler said. “You know, they they they were the early residents here. They helped build the houses. They helped build the community.”
Wheeler said the organization needs to conduct a ground-penetrating radar survey to accurately determine the number of people buried at the site. Wheeler said the cemetery reached capacity around 1965 because workers would frequently unearth existing bodies whenever they attempted to inter someone new.
“The ground-penetrating work is best done before we do a lot of restoration work up there because it depends on determining where the ground has been disturbed or not disturbed,” Wheeler said. “And if we start moving in where, you know, we can obviously move in dirt to where it’s obviously a sunken grave, but for a lot of the other areas it needs to, you know, be able to determine if, you know, the ground is where it was.”
Wheeler said a section of the historic limestone wall at the chapel has collapsed, leaving the interior vulnerable to the elements and animals. Wheeler said the organization is seeking $6,000 for the wall repairs and has raised approximately $400 toward that goal.
“The to date the interior has done incredibly well,” Wheeler said. “The floors are in really good shape, but with the wall down and the longer it takes to repair it, the more risk of damage of of mother nature with the rain getting in there and causing it harder to make it repair inside on the floor and also makes it more accessible for the animals, like the raccoons, um, and those things to gain access to it and do more damage to the interior.”
Wheeler said volunteer Ricky Baker spent roughly 70 hours clearing brush and saplings from the land earlier this year. Wheeler said this work allowed the group to identify at least two headstones that had not been recorded in the last 40 years.
“I think the most meaningful project for me that, you know, I wasn’t really as directly involved in was seeing the ground cleared,” Wheeler said. “And just knowing, you know, walking up there and having it now where we can walk through it and we can identify, you know, where more of the stones are and we actually with his work there were two stones two at least two new stones that have been identified that nobody’s ever seen before, recorded in the last 40 years.”
Wheeler said the long-term vision for the Seay Chapel includes establishing a local museum to highlight the history of Alexandria. Wheeler said the restored building could also host community events, family reunions, and weddings.
“We’re hoping to be able to restore it and then have it go for a local museum that highlights the history of Alexandria and also to be able to be used by the community for community events,” Wheeler said. “Uh, it would be great maybe if we could, you know, have family reunions there, um, as well as, you know, maybe we might be able to open up to weddings for people where Alexandria’s important to them um and to that area.”
The organization will host a cemetery workday Saturday starting at 8am to straighten stones, clear brush, and fill sunken graves with donated dirt.
