River Bluff High was built next to a Black church cemetery. Students honor its history
River Bluff High School may be one of the newer schools in Lexington County, but that doesn’t mean the sprawling campus on Corley Mill Road is without history, as junior Rachel Loging learned.
When she found out the wooded area between the main school building and the River Bluff athletic complex included several graves of African Americans dating back to the 1800s, Loging felt intrigued. Among other feelings.
“When you first hear about it, it is kind of creepy. Like, why is there a cemetery on my high school campus?” Loging said. “But when you learn the history it makes sense.”
On Tuesday, River Bluff honored that history, unveiling a new marker to the historic Mount Zion AME cemetery and those resting there, including one man who died from the wounds he sustained fighting in World War I. Loging and other student volunteers have worked to clear the area, identify unmarked graves and establish a public path so visitors can reach a spot that, thanks to the passage of time and the encroaching trees, had been almost forgotten.
History teacher Michael Burgess made sure his students knew what history lay right outside their classroom doors, but Loging decided to take on the hidden site as a project.
“When this student came to me saying she wanted to do something, to have a student-led cleanup at 9 on a Saturday morning,” Burgess was skeptical what kind of help they would really have, he said. “But on the day, she had 30 young people out here.”
Before the Civil War, the River Bluff campus was the Lorick plantation, which included 53 enslaved workers as of 1860. Those people would have been freed when Sherman’s army marched through the plantation as they forded the Saluda River on their way to Columbia.
After the war, the Loricks turned over part of the property for the use of a “brush arbor” church — an outdoor congregation started by freedmen who left a predominantly white Methodist church to start their own house of worship. They built Mount Zion AME Church on the site in 1874, including space where many parishioners were buried over the coming decades.
Junior Karina Kewlani helped clear away fallen trees, leading the River Bluff students to discover glassware and small porcelain dolls long hidden in the undergrowth, items that once may have marked the graves of loved ones.
Those items are now collected around a central marker for the graves of several children in the cemetery. Based on their time of death, Loging speculates they may have been victims of the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak — the deadly, worldwide pandemic of a century ago.
“A large part is just preserving it,” Kewlani said of the students’ work at the site. “We want to acknowledge that this history does exist.”
Maybe the most notable person buried on the River Bluff campus is Davis Gantt, who deployed to France in the Great War as part of the segregated 371st Infantry Division. Gantt was wounded in the fall of 1918, and he died of infection within a year of his return to South Carolina.
By 1929, the church relocated to a site on Cromer Road, where New Mount Zion AME Church and its graveyard stand today. Church members rolled the original church’s cornerstone on logs for more than a mile to reach the new site.
But the church didn’t move on from its original graveyard. The most recent burial River Bluff has identified on the site is of a man who died in 1937.
Older members of the church passed on knowledge of the original church cemetery, but that generation passed away years ago, said New Mount Zion trustee Phillip Bennett. He breaks into a smile when he thinks about the young people without that connection to the people buried here who nevertheless worked to honor them.
“It’s really amazing. It warms my heart,” Bennett said. “With all the negative things put on them this year, they chose to come out here on a Saturday to do manual labor ... We have great appreciation for the student body at River Bluff.”
The students say they plan to continue to work to improve the area and better identify and mark graves that now are little more than indentations in the ground. Burgess is proud that they have recognized the importance of the history on their own campus.
“These were people striving for the American Dream, a dream that began for them in the bondage of slavery and ended in the Jim Crow South,” Burgess said. “We should appreciate their struggle, their sacrifice and their success.”
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