African American Graves

African American Graves. Place of Remembrance. In this part of the churchyard are buried African Americans who attended St. Mark's, most of them former slaves. The church was founded and built in 1849 by slaveowners, using wealth that came in part from slave labor. It still has part of the original balcony where slaves were seated for worship. After emancipation, some freedpersons remained in the congregation., The gravestone of twelve-year-old Cornelius Johnson is one of the oldest in the whole cemetery. He died in the same month that the battle of Gettysburg was fought., Fanny Wade and her husband William lived in nearby Fairplay. She is named in the St. Mark's parish register as "a communicant of this parish" and served as a godmother to African-American children who were baptized by the rector of St. Mark's., Isaac and Letty Ann Warfield escaped from slavery in this neighborhood before the Civil War because of a threat to sell one of their daughters. They returned here from Pennsylvania in the 1870s and built a log house that still stands today on Breathedsville Road, about a mile east of here. Isaac was baptized and confirmed at St. Mark's in 1908 as a 75-year-old man., Frank Allen, born in 1849 in Virginia, was buried here in 1898, but has no gravestone. He and his wife Ellen Belle, daughter of the Warfields, had four children baptized by the rector of St. Mark's at the College of St. James, about two miles northwest of here. Frank and Ellen Belle Allen, along with the Warfields, are ancestors of the Dolemans of Hagerstown, the founders of the Doleman Black Heritage Museum.