In 2006, the city of High Springs hired a company to use ground-penetrating radar to find the plots of the ancestors of many High Springs residents buried in Pine Hills Cemetery during the 1800s. The following is a news story from The Gainesville Sun about this activity:
Elizabeth Davis' history lies down a narrow, wooded road barely visible from U.S. 441.
Her mother and stepfather are both buried beneath tomb-like concrete slabs in the family plot in Pine Hills Cemetery, the traditionally black cemetery in this small, rural town northwest of Gainesville.
Her grandfather is there, too, but his grave has no marker - only a family's collective memory of him being buried there in 1927.
A long-lost project recently brought to completion by a recent University of Florida graduate changed that, giving Davis, 77, and others in the city a way to respect their ancestors and connect with their history.
"These are my people," Davis said, standing over the marked and unmarked graves in her family plot. "At one time, we had wooden crosses for them, but they rotted away on us. This is how we remember them."
The project to identify and map the unmarked graves started with a cemetery cleanup several years ago.
Davis was just one of several women who grew disgusted with the condition of Pine Hills, saying it looked shabby and unkempt in comparison to the traditionally white cemetery in town.
The group visited the High Springs City Commission to ask for help.
"A lot of these people have lived in High Springs their whole lives, with their families having lived there for centuries," said Bill Coughlin, who was a city commissioner at the time. "They have an emotional attachment to the resting places of their ancestors, and it means a lot to them to see that others have respect for that space as well."
The city quickly realized the cemetery would require more than just some mowing and weeding. People were afraid to use their family plots because they'd unearthed unmarked graves where their own plots were supposed to be, Davis said.
The city hired a company to use ground-penetrating radar to identify locations of possible unmarked graves. The company found roughly 500, and marked those spots with 6-inch concrete cylinders.
That's when a group of UF civil engineering students got involved. Rachel Conn, now a 24-year-old engineer at Jones Edmunds & Associates, was a sophomore in the fall of 2001 when a professor brought up the idea of surveying the unmarked graves.
For the next several months, Conn said a group of as many as 15 engineering students traveled to High Springs on Saturdays to survey and map the cemetery, eventually completing a rough drawing showing the location of each grave site.
But as students graduated and moved, or started master's programs like Conn, the project died off.
Mike Clark, an engineer for Jones Edmunds & Associates who also serves as High Springs' city engineer, happened to hear about the incomplete project recently, and brought it up to Conn.
"He asked if I knew anything about this cemetery project, and I said, 'Uh, yeah, it's mine,' " Conn said.
Conn delved into the mapping project again - this time, with better resources. Jones Edmunds helped her put the data into GIS format, and Conn used the old data from the survey work she and other students did to create a map residents can use to identify both marked and unmarked graves.
Conn presented it to the City Commission two weeks ago, and to the group of women responsible for cleaning up the cemetery last week.
"The goal here was to make sure that if people are buried in other people's plots, they know about it," Conn said.
It had the added benefit of giving people like Davis, who knew their relatives were buried in the cemetery but had lost track of the exact location, a way to honor their past.
"You see these blocks?" said Doris M. Wright, 68, another cemetery activist, motioning toward the concrete cylinders dotting the cemetery. "Every one of these, there's a grave underneath it. It's our history out here."
-- Source
An estimated 3,000 graves are located in this cemetery.