Decades after a historic Alberta cemetery was reclaimed from the forest, a group of volunteers is preserving both the graves and the stories of the Black pioneers who were buried there.
Headstones will soon be placed to mark the burial plots of 13 men, women and children interred at the Bethel Baptist Cemetery, one of the last remaining traces of the once-thriving Black settlement of Campsie, Alta., about 135 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.
Campsie was settled in the early 1900s when hundreds of African-Americans, fleeing escalating violence of newly enacted Jim Crow laws, left the United States and settled in the Canadian Prairies.
(In 1997) church members and other community volunteers spent hundreds of hours clearing the site of weeds and willow branches and then searched for the graves of the 13 known graves, marked only with small, faded markers.
Approximately $8,000 was needed for the project when fundraising efforts began last year. A remaining $2,700 of that total is still needed to install the headstones this spring, he said.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Decades after a historic Alberta cemetery was reclaimed from the forest, a group of volunteers is preserving both the graves and the stories of the Black pioneers who were buried there.
Headstones will soon be placed to mark the burial plots of 13 men, women and children interred at the Bethel Baptist Cemetery, one of the last remaining traces of the once-thriving Black settlement of Campsie, Alta., about 135 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.
“This community hasn’t really been given a whole bunch of recognition,” said Beaver, the founder of Black Settlers of Alberta and Saskatchewan Historical Society.
They settled primarily in five isolated, rural communities closely connected by kinship and trade: Campsie, Junkins (now Wildwood, Alta.
The Beavers remained in the area for decades but, as the years passed, most of the settler families moved away — and the cemetery they had established was soon swallowed by weeds and brush.
Bill Warwaryick, a member of the Barrhead congregation, said the project began as part of a worldwide day of service for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
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