WEBVTT
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[bell chimes]
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We tell stories here
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so that people know and understand
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that those who came before them
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have something in common with them.
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The people that were buried here,
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they were people, they were important,
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they had a good head on their shoulders,
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and you don't really hear that enough
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in today's society.
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You're only hearing they were slaves, they were beaten,
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they were this, they were that.
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I was able to realize that my own people
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were successful people.
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There was a stone out in those lots
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for a fellow by the name of John Munroe.
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He was the quartermaster sergeant
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in a colored regiment in the Civil War.
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Place of death, Henry and Amity Streets
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so he was hit by a truck on February 21st.
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He died of a fractured skull,
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having served in the Civil War.
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We don't know whether he was a slave
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up until his enlistment or he had been a free man
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right before that.
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Green-Wood was founded in 1838
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as a part of the rural cemetery movement,
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so that was an international movement
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that started in Paris, and the idea was
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that the practice had been burying people
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in the urban centers and that was not going very well.
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Green-Wood ultimately, by the end of the 19th century,
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grows to 478 acres and was the largest developed cemetery
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in the world by 1900.
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When you look in the Green-Wood map,
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you wouldn't see the colored lots.
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You would see that spot and it was very vacant,
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very gloomy, and very sad there.
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The environment just did not feel the same
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as the other parts of the lots
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where it was more flowers, it was more headstones,
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it was more just life there.
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When you first took a look at the words the colored lots,
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it is no longer appropriate to ever use
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those kind of words here or anywhere.
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These people were free.
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They had a life.
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They had a story and we wanted to represent them
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as people that got their lives together
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so we changed that name to hold their legacy as well.
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The restoration project started about 10 years ago.
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We sent a crew of workers out there
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who poked into the ground, listening for pinging sounds
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and brought about a dozen gravestones out of the ground.
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Last year, our restoration team leader
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worked with a group of high school students
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who pulled stones out of the ground again.
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In planning this project, we were able to get
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survey maps from the 19 teens and twenties
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that showed this area of the cemetery
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and what monuments were there in the '20s.
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We knew that this would potentially change history.
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They're not shown in the textbooks that we read,
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they're not portrayed in the media that we see.
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They're not anywhere.
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We got to shed light on who's here,
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who's buried here, who are these people?
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We got to understand what happened here.
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Within the freedom lots, none of
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the monuments there have foundations.
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Over long periods of time, they do tend to sink.
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We were able to unearth 12 stones, however two of
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those stones were really broken past fixing.
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It was a child buried and it was cracked
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into a lot of pieces and I began to cry
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because I felt horrible, I felt like it was
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all of our faults.
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You know, as a conservator, sometimes I can
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say yeah, we can fix almost anything
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but having a bunch of high school students
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look at me and me tell them we can't fix this,
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you know, this is over 80 pieces of marble
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and you can't just glue them back together,
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that was really tough.
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When we finally finished, we took flowers
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and we put a beautiful flower by each
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of the monuments as you would with your own family.
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They didn't have a family, so we were their family.
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We found that a handful of the lots
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were actually specifically for an orphanage
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that was originally in midtown,
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and it's crazy because some of those kids,
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you know, are not that different in age
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from the kids that were working there,
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so it really makes it a little bit more important.
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When you see the lots and you see how few headstones
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we have and then you realize that we have over 1,300
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people buried there, it can be quite humbling.
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There were certain businesses,
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certain professions that were open to people of color
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in the 19th century and others that were not so much,
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and so you do get this sense of surviving
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at the economic edge and just the experience
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of trying to make it in the world.
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Believe it or not, these were people
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that had a life just like us and they had a story.
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Everyone has a story.
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People from a different era lived a totally different life
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are now here, and this is something that
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can shape history and shape other people's minds
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to think differently.