George Phelps Jr. has led a four-year effort to restore the overgrown Brewer Hill Cemetery in Annapolis. But last year, while walking through the city's oldest black graveyard, the dirt caved beneath his feet and he fell seven feet onto a pile of bones.
The cave-in at a severely damaged mass burial site known as Smallpox Hill demonstrates how much work has been done and how much still needs to be done. The cemetery no longer is overrun by brambles and littered with toppled tombstones, but no one could find the burial site for victims of a smallpox epidemic in the early 1900s until the other work had been completed.
Since then, Mr. Phelps' group, the Brewer Hill Cemetery Association, has worked to fill in the area where erosion had exposed dozens of bones, metal casket pieces and submerged grave markers. Now, the organization is trying to secure a small federal stipend to help pay for the upkeep of the cemetery on West Street near Taylor Avenue.
Mr. Phelps says the graveyard merits federal money because it serves as a U.S. veterans' cemetery. One-third of the 7,000 buried there fought either in the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I or World War II or Korea. They couldn't be buried in the National Cemetery, separated from Brewer Hill by only a thick hedge, because it was off limits to blacks until 1942.
"We don't need a lot of money," said Mr. Phelps, 68, who runs Phelps Protection Systems in Annapolis. "We just need enough to keep it from looking like a wilderness."
That's what volunteers say it looked like in 1990 when they first came in with rakes and shovels to pull weeds and underbrush from the graves and pathways. Large mud patches spotted the property, statues were hidden by thick vines and, in some remote spots, caskets jutted from the ground.
"Oh, it was quite rundown. It was an eyesore," said Irene Reese, an Annapolis native who buried her youngest brother, James Randall, at Brewer Hill 14 years ago.
The place looks a lot different now. The association has replaced the bent metal fence with an 800-foot brick wall, installed a new brick storage house by the front gate, cleaned out the brambles and shored up the tombstones.
In the next year it hopes to complete work on the building and rebuild the road that leads into the cemetery.
Initially, the group drew its money from a $10,700 community development block grant awarded by the city, but now it relies mostly on donations from Annapolis residents and families of those buried there.
Meanwhile, the group's members are interviewing surviving relatives and sifting through church records, family archives and burial plot certificates to unearth the history of Brewer Hill. In one plot, a slave cook is buried with her frying pan. In others, soldiers are interred with their medals.
"Historically, black people had a great part in the building of Annapolis, and most of those people are buried in the cemetery," Mr. Phelps said.
The graveyard began as an enterprise by free blacks.
In 1863, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation, 11 black Annapolis businessmen created the People's Brewer Hill Cemetery Corporation of Anne Arundel County. They purchased the 4.5-acre cemetery lot for $758 from state Circuit Court Judge Nicholas Brewer. The judge died a year later, but the businessmen kept his name on the cemetery's front gate.
Among the black landowners was Mr. Phelps' great-uncle, William H. Phelps, who paid off the property for 35 years.
A few years later, another Annapolis dweller, William H. Brown, purchased a burial plot for $25 and became one of the cemetery's superintendents. Because the cemetery lacked a record system, it was Mr. Brown who led people through and helped them find family graves.
Now he is buried there, as are his wife and seven of his 10 children. One of his sons, Philip L. Brown, 85, wants to make sure the cemetery is preserved.
"It is an important fixture in the black life of Annapolis," said Mr. Brown, who wrote "The Other Annapolis," a book about black life in the city. "You walk through there and you see the names of families you know. I grew up with some of their children. As far back as I can remember, the cemetery was there."
On one plot, near a white obelisk, is the marker for Wiley H. Bates, who moved to Annapolis from North Carolina after the Civil War. He ran a grocery and general store on Cathedral Street and served two years on the Annapolis City Council. Before he died in 1935, he purchased a plot of land on Smithfield Street for construction of a school, once the only high school for blacks in Annapolis.
Also buried there is John Snowden, who was hanged on Feb. 28, 1919, at the age of 28 for murdering a pregnant white woman. His death certificate shows he was buried at Brewer Hill a few days later. On the eve of the hanging, martial law was declared in Annapolis, with machine guns in place at the old jail and 42 Baltimore policemen on patrol in the city's streets.
Mr. Snowden's descendants and other city residents still are fighting for a posthumous pardon, saying that the true murderer was never caught. The day after Mr. Snowden was hanged, The Evening Capital received an anonymous letter: "I am sorry you killed Snowden today. He is not the guilty man. I am the guilty man . . . "
There are the undiscovered graves. Mary Naylor, a slave hanged for the death of her white master in July 1861, is believed to be buried there. "I look to my blessed Savior and my God, for he knows that I am as innocent of this crime as the angels in Heaven," she was quoted as saying in The Sun that year. Researchers believe she could be buried on Smallpox Hill, and Mr. Phelps has vowed to search for her grave.
"We will find her remains, even if we have to dig up the entire cemetery," he wrote in a letter to the association's members.
"We want to restore the historic dignity of this place," Mr. Phelps said recently. "We are trying to resurrect the dignity of a proud people."