Forty Acres at Hot Springs: The Black Community Only Archeology Remembers

When Nancy Green died in 1949, her death certificate recorded her age, marital status, occupation, birthplace, parents and middle name with the same word: "unknown." She was probably the last person living in a Black community that had stood for sixty years on land that is now Hot Springs National Park. The paper record of that community is nearly that thin throughout. Almost everything known about it comes from what its people left in the ground.

A place to make money

Reconstruction was a time of hope for African Americans in Hot Springs, Arkansas. More than 200,000 freed people settled in Arkansas between 1870 and 1910, most of them choosing for the first time where to live and what to do. Newspapers advertised Hot Springs as a quiet place with good jobs and land to be had, and between 1860 and 1880 its African American population more than doubled, to 1,562 people — 17.3% of the town. As Joe Golden, a formerly enslaved man, put it: "Hot Springs was a good place to make money."

Downtown Hot Springs in 1873. Library of Congress.

In 1882, Peter and Fannie Henderson filed a land patent claiming 40 acres from the federal government and moved onto it with their adult son, Robert. Census records put Peter's birth in Arkansas around 1818, Fannie's in Virginia in the early 1800s, and Robert's in Mississippi around 1850; where the family lived before 1870 is unknown. A neighbor writing to the journal Gleanings in Bee Culture in 1883 described a poor, hardworking family trying creative ways to support their community — Henderson was hoping to get a bee smoker, and was, the writer said, one of the few formerly enslaved men he had seen try to keep bees.

What the ground holds

National Park Service archeologists ran three surface-only projects on the 40 acres: one looking for structures and artifacts, two focused on a cemetery.

One of the stone foundations. NPS.

A cosmetic jar embossed "Harriet Hubbard Ayer Famous Toilet Preparations U.S.A." NPS.

That violence was not abstract. In 1913, a man accused of murder was taken from a home near the Henderson community, brought to downtown Hot Springs and lynched.

Cedar Mountain Cemetery

Most graves are unmarked or topped with plain field stones. Grave depressions and non-invasive geophysical survey — ground-penetrating radar, magnetometry and resistivity — show that 50 to 75 people were buried here between 1890 and 1950. Only two names are known.

Plotted conductivity data from the geophysical survey. NPS.

Private Stephen Lawrence served in the 1st U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery. Born in North Carolina in 1839, he had his eyes injured by smallpox during the war, recovered and served two more years. He patented his own land in 1890 at Buckville, a nearby community now under Lake Ouachita, and died in 1893 — but was buried with the Henderson community, which went to the trouble of obtaining a military headstone for him.

A marble Civil War shield tablet inscribed "S. LAWRENCE/CO. H./1 U.S.C.H.A." NPS.

Nancy Green was identified by a small funeral-home marker. Her death certificate names the burial ground Cedar Mountain Cemetery. In 1988 a local resident remembered her to NPS staff as a respected nanny known as "Aunt Nancy." She appears on no local census.

Nancy Green's burial marker. NPS photo.

Faith, and older traditions

The people buried here were Christian, but grave goods show African traditions persisting through the 19th century, as in Black cemeteries across the South: white items or things tied to water, like a white enamel cup and pitcher fragments, for cleansing and purification; medicine bottles turned upside down on the graves of people taking them when they died; metal pipes as grave markers creating passages.

Four trash dumps around the cemetery were probably left by Decoration Day or Homecoming gatherings, when families clean the graves and eat together. Two pieces of one distinctive pitcher were in the dumps and a third on a grave — a link between the meal and the dead.

19th-century ceramics from the dumps. NPS photo.

Glass sherds from a pitcher. NPS.

Archeological sites and artifacts on federal land are protected by the Archaeological Resources Protection Act; disturbing or removing them without a permit is illegal.

Sources

Based on "Building an African American Community at Hot Springs," National Park Service, Hot Springs National Park; a work of the United States government in the public domain.