By Associated Press
Town Creek AL – The remains of more than 200 people buried at the historic Foster Cemetery, some dating to the slave era before the Civil War, are being moved following the sale of the property last year.
The Southeastern Anthropological Institute at Northwest Shoals Community College is relocating the remains from the cemetery on Doublehead Resort property that was part of Thomas Jefferson Foster's plantation in the 19th century.
Hunter Johnson, an anthropologist who is supervising the relocation, told The Decatur Daily in a story Friday that about 75 of the graves have been reburied in a cemetery near Alabama 101 and Lawrence County 184.
The relocation started in March and included manually digging up the three-acre cemetery. When Robbins Property Development sold the resort in 2006, part of the deal required the company to relocate the cemetery.
Foster, who was born in 1809, served in the Confederate Congress, but he opposed secession. He had a slave cemetery on his plantation.
Some of the names in the cemetery were slave names on Foster's 1849 Lawrence County tax assessment record. To help identify who may be buried in the cemetery, workers held a series of meetings in black churches in the area.
Archaeologists and volunteers cataloged more than 100,000 items, including the remains of 227 people, once the excavation was completed in June.
Most of the burials, which started before the Civil War and continued until the early 1980s, were in wood caskets that had deteriorated.
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Information from: The Decatur Daily, http://www.decaturdaily.com/decaturdaily/index.shtml