Texas crews excavate bones of purported ex-slaves

Posted: Saturday, January 14, 2012 4:40 pm | Updated: 5:08 pm, Sun Jan 15, 2012.
Associated Press

Crews of scientists with wooden spoons and small metal picks dig carefully around bones embedded in a dry lake bed, excavating what is believed to be the remains of freed slaves and their children buried in a long-forgotten cemetery.

More than two dozen graves were exposed this summer in a section of a reservoir that dried up in the severe Texas drought. Officials later organized a thorough excavation effort and were recently embroiled in a brief legal battle over where to rebury the bones.

With the legal issues resolved and the excavation effort two weeks from completion, the unidentified skeletal remains then will be moved to a cemetery in Navarro County where other black families have been laid to rest.

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A memorial marker will be placed at the new burial site about 80 miles southeast of Fort Worth, but identifying the newly discovered remains likely will not happen. Crews have found no nameplates on the wooden coffins that have long since deteriorated, and no headstones were in the cemetery on land that became Richland-Chambers Lake in the 1980s. No DNA testing is planned.

http://baytownsun.com/texas_ap/article_bc8c8583-b430-50ab-8f06-e307cd6e1e8c.html