A Tale of Two Cemeteries: Part II—Cheesy Grits on Pitt Street

I wrote earlier about Charleston's Brown Fellowship Society (BFS). Founded in 1790 by Free Persons of Color who were members of St. Philip's Episcopal, the BFS primarily provided for burials for its members because while they were of white descent and attended white churches, they could not buried alongside white folks in thechurchyards where they were members.

In 1794, BFS purchased a lot on Pitt Street just south of Boundary/Calhoun Street for its cemetery. At that point, Bounday (the name was changed to Calhoun in 1851) marked the northern boundary of the city, meaning that the BFS cemetery was just within the city limits.


The map below is a street map of Charleston dated 1855 from the collection at the University of Texas at Austin. The red cross marks the approximate location of the Brown Fellowship Cemetery:

Approximate location of the Brown Fellowship Cemetery
Charleston, SC
(The cartographer had not yet caught up with the Boundary-to-Calhoun street name change.)

Because the antebellum BFS was composed of relatively well-to-do Free Persons of Color of Charleston, the list of names of those buried at the Pitt Street location reads like a "Who's Who": Schoolmaster Thomas S. Bonneau is buried there, as are many of the Holloway family, the Dereef family, and the Weston family, including Anthony, Maria (the richest Free Person of Color in Charleston up until the Civil War), and the tailor brothers, Jacob and Samuel.

The end of the Civil War meant, among many other things, the eradication of the distinction between free and slave. The descendants of Charleston's ante-bellum elite Free Persons of Color maintained a certain social distinctiveness, but that also diminished over time with the inevitable aging and death of those born before the Civil War. The concomitant rise of Jim Crow laws also served to suppress old internal social distinctions.

In consequence, membership in the Brown Fellowship Society declined after the Civil War; burials at the Pitt Street cemetery declined as well. At its centennial celebration in 1890, the BFS decided to "rebrand" itself as the "Century Fellowship Society", although most continued to think of it as the "Brown Fellowship Society" anyway—to the extent they thought of it at all. As the membership died out, so did the funds to maintain the cemetery.

The Brown Fellowship Cemetery was not alone in its slow descent into desuetude. By 1905, the City of Charleston had taken official notice of the number of either abandoned or apparently dormant cemeteries within the city limits. In the City of Charleston's 1905 Yearbook, the City Health Officer, F. L. Frost, M.D., reported that of twelve African-American cemeteries he had inspected in the city, five had had no interments at all and two more had only one or two in the preceding year. Dr. Frost's further opinion was that cemeteries throughout the city would be largely abandoned (in the sense of having no more burials) within a few years in favor of burial grounds outside the city.

I haven't yet identified the last burial at the BFS Pitt Street location, but events caught up with the BFS and other cemeteries around 1935. While properties such as cemeteries could not be taxed directly, the City decided that all properties including private cemeteries could be assessed a tax for the maintenance of streets and sidewalks. Cemeteries whose owners/trustees didn't or couldn't pay were seized by the Charleston City Sheriff and sold at auction.

This was the fate that befell the BFS Cemetery on Pitt Street—except that there were still one or two trustees left who were nevertheless capable of opposing the sale even if they could not at the moment afford the taxes.

As it turned out, there was a third party which had had an eye on the Pitt Street property for some time: the Catholic Diocese of Charleston, whose Bishop England School had opened in 1922 in the same block as the BFS Cemetery. In fact, the cemetery was in the school's back yard, and as the school grew, it found that cemetery space more and more desirable.

There followed protracted negotiations between first the City of Charleston and the few remaining trustees of the Brown Fellowship Society, and subsequently the Diocese of Charleston. Ultimately, in 1956, the BFS sold the Pitt Street property to the Diocese and bought a new cemetery lot on Cunnington Avenue in North Charleston, with the apparent understanding that the terms and conditions of the sale obligated the Diocese to exhume the remains from the Pitt Street site for reburial at the Cunnington Avenue site.

But after the completion of the sale, the Catholic Diocese apparently simply removed the remaining gravemarkers and paved over the cemetery, making it into a parking lot. There is no evidence that any remains were ever disinterred for reburial at the new Cunnington Avenue location. A small group of headstones was found some years later behind a school garage. They were individually removed to the Cunnington Avenue site and placed in a small marked-off area:

Monuments/headstones from the original Brown Fellowship Society Cemetery on Pitt Street
which were removed to the Cunnington Avenue site sometime after the 1956 sale.

In 1998, the Diocese of Charleston moved the Bishop England High School out of the city and sold the property to the College of Charleston. The Chicora Foundation's report on Charleston's abandoned cemeteries notes what inevitably happened:

"In 2001, as the property was being cleared for the construction of a new College of Charleston library, the cemetery was again 'discovered....' (p.43)

meaning of course that markers, graves, and remains were 'found.' ('Found' in quotes because plenty of people already knew that the remains were there.) The College wasn't sufficiently deterred by the finding of human remains to make other plans for what is now the Marlene and Nathan Addlestone Library. They did, however, erect a monument behind the new library to commemorate those buried underneath what is now a pleasant open quadrangle and an adjacent library staff parking lot.

Monument to those buried in the Brown Fellowship Cemetery and adjacent burial grounds.
The vehicle seen to the right is in the parking lot and is undoubtedly parked on graves.
The photographer—in this case, me—was also undoubtedly standing on graves to take this picture.
The monument was erected in 2008; the photo was taken in 2012.

The South Carolina Historical Society recently transferred its main reading room and archive from its Meeting Street location to the 3rd floor of the Addlestone Library. From the 3rd floor lounge just outside the Historical Society Reading Room, one can look out over the quadrangle and the parking lot and over the final resting places of Jane's great-great-great grandparents, Robert (d. 1883) and Harriett Howard (d. 1858)—both buried at the BFS Cemetery on Pitt Street.



Sources:

1905 Yearbook, City of Charleston:
https://books.google.com/books?id=D3YWAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA125&dq=charleston+sc+abandoned+cemeteries&hl=en&sa=X&ei=2eYWVbCCE8K1ggSZv4OYDQ&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=charleston%20sc%20abandoned%20cemeteries&f=false

Michael Trinkley, Debi Hacker, Nicole Southerland, The Silence of the Dead: Giving Charleston's Cemeteries a Voice. Research Series No. 67 (Chicora Foundation; 2010). This is the essential guide to Charleston's abandoned cemeteries. It includes maps locating each cemetery and photos where possible. The section on the Brown Fellowship Cemetery includes several photos of the old cemetery, and one can see rows of grave markers, some quite elaborate. The picture includes a portion of the old carriage house, which was being converted to a small meeting house, but was never completed.

A listing of Charlestonians identified in the Charleston municipal death records as having been buried at the Brown Fellowship Cemetery between 1821 and 1884 may be seen at this link. The City of Charleston ceased aggregating death records onto weekly tally sheets after 1884, meaning that extracting names and burial locations after that date requires reviewing each individual death certificate, which task exceeds your writer's current levels of stamina.