In 2015, the University of Georgia broke ground on a planned expansion of Baldwin Hall, an academic building on campus. Baldwin Hall’s graceful neoclassical façade masks the fact that the building’s foundations rest on a burial ground that is nearly two centuries old.
At the time, the university was unaware of what lay beneath the earth. So it came as a surprise when workers excavating the site uncovered a human skull. Work halted so that an archaeological team could step in to examine the findings. Other human remains were soon discovered.
Baldwin Hall sits close by Jackson Street Cemetery, also known as Old Athens Cemetery, Athens’ original burial site. The burial ground was in use from approximately 1810 to 1856, before the cemetery ran out of land and Athens developed Oconee Hill Cemetery.
After it went out of use, parts of Jackson Street Cemetery were neglected. The state deeded cemetery land to the expanding university, which subsequently built Baldwin Hall in 1938, some 70 years after the burial ground was closed. From the surface at least, the land then would most likely have appeared to be unclaimed, although workers reportedly uncovered human remains when the building was first constructed.
Fast forward to 2017: after careful study, a team of UGA anthropologists and the Southeastern Archaeological Services determined that they had discovered 105 grave sites by Baldwin Hall. The graves were dug into dense, rocky soil, and 63 contained skeletons or fragments of human remains.
Through DNA testing, it was determined that the remains belonged to people of African descent, meaning that the people buried by Baldwin Hall were most likely enslaved during their lifetimes, according to Dr. Laurie Reitsema, an assistant professor in the UGA Department of Anthropology and director of the Bioarchaeology and Biochemistry Laboratory.
“We know that they were of African ancestry, and we know that people of African ancestry living in Athens were usually enslaved prior to 1865,” Reitsema says.