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Midland Cemetery, home to graves of Black Civil War veterans, is now owned by group that is restoring it

Patriot-News - 8/14/2020

For decades, the nonprofit Friends of Midland group has been working to restore the historic Midland Cemetery in Swatara Township which holds the graves of many Black Civil War veterans and generations of community leaders.

With the stroke of a pen, a Dauphin County judge has just made that group the official owner of the 225-year-old burial ground, which had been abandoned and left to fall into ruin.

That act should clear away any potential legal obstacle to the Midland group’s continuing effort to restore the graveyard and emphasize its place in the region’s history. For one thing, the group will now be eligible for government grants to finance its work, money it couldn’t receive without holding official title to the property.

Judge John J. McNally’s order shifting ownership to the friends group came just a week after attorney Daniel Stern filed the request on behalf of the friends organization and its president, Barbara Barksdale. No entity opposed the move, and the state attorney general’s office actively endorsed it.

The declaration of Midland’s right to the cemetery was needed because no other entity had been taking responsibility for the graveyard since at least the 1980s.

Court filings state the cemetery was created in around 1795 “as the segregated cemetery for the ‘colored’ in Dauphin County.” Slavery still existed in Pennsylvania at the time and segregation was the norm even after death.

“The cemetery holds the remains of ministers, enslaved persons, educators, businessmen, women and children and those who served in the United States Colored Troops, the Buffalo Soldiers and all branches of the United States armed forces,” the association’s petition for ownership states.

The last burial there occurred in 1986.

The last known prior owner was the Midland Cemetery Association, organized in 1934. That group ceased to function in the mid-1980s, “and the cemetery fell into serious disrepair,” the friends group said.

Barksdale’s volunteer organization was created in 1993. It has been working to rehabilitate the graveyard since then. Its efforts have been praised by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission and by township officials. State and local leaders have been attending commemorations the friends group holds at the cemetery each Memorial Day.

One of the group’s more recent ventures occurred around Memorial Day of 2019 when military veterans from the Team Rubicon group volunteered to cut down more than two dozen trees in Ancestor Grove, the cemetery’s oldest section. The work was done so ground penetrating radar could be brought in to help map the location of unmarked graves.

Burials in that section date from the late 1700s and early 1800s. Barksdale said it is believed many of those interred in Ancestor Grove were slaves.

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