By Jenna Herazo Published: Apr. 18, 2025
CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) - A sacred piece of Charleston’s past is getting a 21st-century safeguard.
The Charleston Humane and Friendly Cemetery in the heart of the Holy City is now part of a cutting-edge digital project aimed not just at preserving graves, but also at honoring legacies and connecting descendants to their roots.
With headstones dating back to the 1800s, the Humane and Friendly Society Cemetery in Charleston is more than just a final resting place, it’s a living archive of African American history. The cemetery was founded in 1802 and established its cemetery in 1856, according to the Preservation Society of Charleston.
The Preservation Society of Charleston teamed up with the College of Charleston’s Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture on Friday to launch the next phase of their Mapping Charleston’s Black Burial Grounds Project.
The cemetery they mapped out is part of an African-American Burial Society, a benevolent group that existed before life insurance, where community members pooled resources to ensure proper burials for their loved ones.
The initiative was led in part by Laurel Fay, Manager of Preservation and Research for the Preservation Society.
“The idea is that we’re going to capture every single stone today, every single name, and hopefully that will help descendants and future researchers find out more about their roots,” she said.
Fay said their focus is on both digitally and physically documenting every grave in historically Black cemeteries, such as the Humane and Friendly Society Cemetery.
“We’re at Humane and friendly Society Cemetery in the Charleston Cemetery Historic District, which is on the National Register of Historic Places. And today we’re here mapping each burial using Survey123, which is an ArcGIS application. And basically, we’re creating a digital map as well as a physical map of everyone in the cemetery. We’re getting help from descendants and our partners at the Avery Research Center today,” she said.
Fay said she’s been mapping cemeteries since graduate school and explained that these sacred sites face threats from climate change, erosion, and neglect.
She added that mapping the cemetery helps identify everyone buried there and could help connect living relatives with possible descendants.
“The historic preservation of cemeteries is extremely important. With the weather conditions that we have, the climate change that we have, we see a lot of the stones in cemeteries like these fall over, or they’re sinking. And so, it’s great to be able to map a cemetery, especially one that hasn’t already been mapped, just to know who is all here, and then to potentially connect with descendants for stewardship purposes. A lot of the cemeteries in this district face challenges like maintenance and landscaping, so that’s a big part of it. It’s just laying the groundwork, figuring out who’s here and how we can preserve the cemetery going forward,” Fay said.
he said the team is building a comprehensive digital record of burials, names, headstones, and locations using tools like Survey123, which will eventually be accessible online through public genealogy sites like FindAGrave.com.
However, she said the effort is more than just collecting data- it’s about a legacy, and ensuring that history and those who came before us are not forgotten.
“So, we’re standing here in an African-American Burial Society Cemetery, and so a lot of people don’t really know what that is. Basically, African-American Burial Societies were benevolent societies that were before life insurance, before things like that. So, people would pool resources to be able to have burials for their community. So, a lot of these societies are no longer active anymore, and they haven’t been for even some generations, but descendants are still active, and the burial grounds themselves might even still be active. So, this is really about honoring that legacy and ensuring that that history isn’t lost or forgotten,” Fay said.
Daron Lee Calhoun II took over as supervisor of the cemetery following the passing of longtime caretaker John Dash. He also serves as the Facilities Outreach and Public Program Coordinator at the Avery Research Center for African-American History and Culture.
Calhoun II said the preservation work honors Dash’s legacy and lifelong dedication to the cemetery.
“Once he passed, we said, ‘Okay, we’re going to take it to the next level in honor of Uncle Johnny,’ as we lovingly call him. So, we were always going to be here. So, Uncle Johnny had us out here cutting the grass and everything, and now we get to actually preserve it and actually keep it and actually bring students out here to do some experiential learning for the College of Charleston. That’s always something we want to do with our students,” he said.
Calhoun II emphasized that it’s incredibly beneficial for students to see the names they read about in textbooks come to life in such a tangible way, helping them connect history to the real world.
“They see these names every day throughout our archives, now they actually get to put their hands on the headstones of the people who were so influential inside of Charleston,” he said.
For Charleston County resident Julia-Ellen Craft Davis, the project hits close to home.
“This is really exciting because we are documenting the names of the people that are buried here. I have ancestors that are here,” she said.
Ellen Craft Davis shared that the documentation of those buried there is exciting, as it ensures her family’s history is preserved for future generations.
“I want to know that 50 years or 100 years from now, we can be sure that everything is maintained so that when my grandkids come up, that they will come, and they will visit. So, we’re hoping to have signage put up there so that we’ll have signs up to let people know the name of the cemetery and also who all are buried here,” she said.
With each grave recorded, a name is remembered, and a story is safeguarded—one map point at a time.
“It’s really important that we work on preserving it, that’s the concern I have. How are we going to maintain all this? Years from now when you have hurricanes and everything, the weather wears everything down, how will it be maintained? So, that’s the concern. I’m so thankful for the Preservation Society and for Avery for helping the community to maintain what we do have…We’re finding names of people who were friends of my grandparents and my great-grandparents. It’s all great for keeping on top of everything. So we don’t lose our history,” she said.
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