Bethany Missionary Baptist Church and the Chipley Historical Center, are seeking to preserve the historic Bethany Missionary Baptist Cemetery. The Bethany Historic Cemetery has over 600 graves, of which over 400 are still covered by trees and underbrush. The Cemetery Committee and volunteers have been working for over 2 years to uncover the graves and identify who is buried there.

Portions of the cemetery may predate the founding of the church making it one of the oldest burial grounds of enslaved Africans and their descendants in Harris County, Georgia. Many of those interred were black farmers, skilled artisans, laborers, soldiers, and some of the first African Americans to own land in Harris County, Georgia. Unfortunately, like many other historic African American cemeteries, this cemetery was lost due to time and is now being rediscovered by descendants and church members.

We seek a restorative way forward to ensure the dignity and honor of our ancestral burial ground, a place that holds important stories, cultural connections and genealogical links to our past. 

Kennesaw State University Graduate Student

Meagan Cater, graduate student, and Dr. Jeffrey Glover from Kennesaw State University are establishing mapping points. Meagan will be with our cemetery project for the next year. She will be working on mapping the cemetery.