Members of St. Anne’s Episcopal Church and the Annapolis, Maryland, community attend a May 4 dedication of the congregation’s Garden of Peace and Remembrance at its historic cemetery. Photo: St. Anne’s Episcopal Church
[Episcopal News Service] An Episcopal church in Annapolis, Maryland, has dedicated a new Garden of Peace and Remembrance in the congregation’s historic cemetery, paying tribute to ancestors, including the enslaved, whose identities have been lost to history.
St. Anne’s Episcopal Church was founded in 1692, and its 17-acre cemetery dates to 1793. By strolling its grounds and inspecting the names on the gravestones, “you will see the entire recorded history of the United States played out there,” the Rev. Manoj Zacharia, St. Anne’s rector, said in an interview with Episcopal News Service.
But not everyone’s lives were recorded or named in that history. Many free and enslaved African Americans who died in Annapolis, the state’s capital city, were buried in the cemetery and then mostly forgotten, with no memorials marking their graves.
On May 4, the congregation held a dedication ceremony for its Garden of Peace and Remembrance. The garden was created in a formerly unused and overgrown section of the cemetery in partnership with Nature Sacred, an Annapolis-based organization that promotes the development of ecologically friendly sanctuaries of green space within urban landscapes.
The garden memorializes ancestors who now are “known only to God.” Many were buried in a section of the St. Anne’s cemetery set aside long ago for members of Annapolis’ Black community. The congregation is researching the cemetery’s history to identify some of the hundreds of people who were buried there without markers.
“We must acknowledge the first part of healing is to accept the fact that the church played a part in the history of slavery. The second part of healing is forgiving one another for the acts of cruelty,” Commissioner Elinor Thompson of the Maryland Commission on African American History & Culture said at the garden’s dedication ceremony, which was attended by about 160 people, including Maryland Bishop Carrie Schofield-Broadbent.
Maryland Bishop Carrie Schofield-Broadbent speaks during the May 4 dedication of the Garden of Peace and Remembrance. Photo: St. Anne’s Episcopal Church
Thompson also served on the garden’s steering committee. “This garden is dedicated to the people who had to go through all the suffering trials and tribulations during those uncertain times,” Thompson said, as quoted in the congregation’s news release. “This garden is also dedicated to those courageous men, women who continued to pray for this generation and all our future generations.”
The garden is part of St. Anne’s ongoing racial reconciliation efforts, which expanded in 2019 with the creation of its Truth and Reconciliation Ministry. The initial goal, Zacharia said, was to tell the story of “the congregation’s complicity in the colonial project.”
St. Anne’s was one of 30 government-established Anglican parishes in colonial Maryland. Its church and cemetery were built on the second-highest hill in Annapolis, eclipsed only by the hill reserved for the statehouse. The churchyard was the city’s only public burial ground through the Revolutionary War, and after the war, the congregation expanded its burial grounds by creating a new cemetery – the 17-acre property that now contains the Garden of Peace and Remembrance.
The Truth and Reconciliation Ministry found that a church fire had destroyed nearly all burial records through the Civil War, though members were able to verify the section of the cemetery where enslaved and free African Americans were buried. They hired a firm specializing in ground radar and determined that hundreds of unknown people are buried there.
The congregation already had been working with Nature Sacred on a garden concept, and after confirming the unmarked burial site, “it became obvious that the garden was meant to honor those souls who we now know are buried in our cemetery but have no memorials to honor their lives,” parishioner Ginger DeLuca, chair of the Cemetery Committee, wrote in a summary of the Truth and Reconciliation Ministry’s work on the garden.
“It is our plan to find as many names as we can and list them on large stones among the flowers,” DeLuca said, along with a dedicated memorial stone for the unknown ancestors.
The garden also offers a place for quiet contemplation, including for residents of the surrounding neighborhood, which is mostly African American, Zacharia said. Future plans include a “scatter garden,” where people may sprinkle the ashes of their deceased loved ones, as well as a columbarium.
“There has been a lot of excitement around this project, a lot of energy,” Zacharia said.
– David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.