YPSILANTI TWP., MI — Some years back, Randall Luten picked up his late cousin in Inkster and took her to Woodlawn Cemetery in Ypsilanti Township
“This is where your daddy is buried,” Luten, 77, a resident of the township, told her.
But the historic Black cemetery, the only one known in Washtenaw County, had been unmaintained since 1965. Trees and vegetation grew up. Many gravestones were buried.
The cemetery, at 7800 S. Huron River Drive, was established in 1946. During a time when other cemeteries refused people of color, Pastor Garther Roberson of Ypsilanti’s Second Baptist Church purchased a plot of land and founded the cemetery.
A restoration effort has been underway since May. November was a game changer.
Donating their services free of charge, geophysicists with Terracon Consulting, an engineering firm with locations across the country, walked the cemetery with ground-penetrating radar machines. High-frequency electromagnetic pulses detected changes in the soil, indicating the locations of burials at the cemetery south of Ford Lake.
When Luten found out about the cemetery restoration effort, he decided to volunteer and help with the cleanup to honor his uncle LC Luten and others buried there.
Luten was only 5 years old when his uncle died at 42 of a heart attack. His uncle had owned a dry-cleaning business on Harriet Street with his father Robert Luten and had three children.
“I didn’t really know him, only what my family told me. My family had gotten older, and they had forgotten where the cemetery was, but then a friend looked it up,” he said.
Now it’s just Randall Luten and his brother who are around to honor their uncle, as LC Luten’s children have all died. But there is still time for them to see their uncle’s gravesite restored and brought the respect it deserves.
“We’re excited about it. We want to find out where he is out there,” Luten said. “I would go out and maintain his tombstone and put flowers down, because for the rest of my family I do that … to pay respect.”
Terracon geophysicist Joseph Snider, based in Ohio, is “confident” they were able to detect many gravesites at Woodlawn Cemetery using ground-penetrating radar.
“There were 160 grave-like anomalies,” Snider said. “We have a pretty high degree of confidence that’s what they are.”
“And any cemetery of any age probably has unmarked graves, and it’s especially true of African American cemeteries, regardless of where they are located in the United States,” Snider said.
A more than 200-strong volunteer effort to clear trees and cleanup the cemetery over the summer made it much easier to detect the grave sites.
“It’s been sort of a dream, the way they’ve cleaned that place up and mowed it nice,” Snider said.
Terracon geophysicists will return in March with more types of equipment to continue the search. They plan to use magnetometry, electromagnetic induction, and electrical resistivity tomography.
Snider thinks it could potentially amount to the “most comprehensive” geophysics project at a cemetery in North America, “or maybe even in the world.”
The Woodlawn Cemetery restoration project has been a collaborative effort spearheaded by the African American Cultural and Historical Museum of Washtenaw County, in partnership with the Washtenaw County Historic District Commission and Ypsilanti Township. The project is also supported by the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation, the Washtenaw County Racial Equity Office, and Washtenaw African American Genealogical Society, among others.
“We want to have a dignified resting place” said Kat Slocum, a historic preservation specialist for Washtenaw County.
Further work will involve restoring the site and locating headstones they haven’t yet found. The team also plans to resurrect and repair headstones, install historic markers, and compile a list of as many people interred there as possible.
They have also found a vendor to nominate the cemetery to the National Register of Historic Places and also for designation as a local historic district.
A national designation would bring opportunities for grant funding, Slocum said.
“The local designation is the most critical,” as it would protect it from future development and prohibit moving graves, she said.
So far, those involved in the project have been able to confirm the names of 108 people buried there. Cemetery records were lost in a garage fire in the 1960s, and a cemetery shed that might have held records collapsed.
“We’ve done a large amount of research,” Slocum said.
They searched obituaries and death records, connected with descendants and churches to figure out who is buried there.
Project updates, restoration plans and more information about Woodlawn Cemetery are available on the African American Cultural and Historical Museum of Washtenaw County’s website, at aachm.org/woodlawn-cemetery
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