MARINE CORPS AIR STATION BEAUFORT, S.C. --
A ceremony
unveiling Edgerly Cemetery was held aboard Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort
Sept. 18.
The site is
located behind the Bachelor Officers Quarters and contains graves from the
Edgerly Plantation dating back to the early 1860s.
Many of the graves
in Edgerly are unmarked but the resting place of Stephen Binyard has recently
been discovered thanks to the efforts of the MCAS Beaufort Cultural Resources
Team and Kimberly Morgan, a local genealogist, and Akosua Moore, a descendant
of Edgerly Plantation.
“When we started,
,”there was a jungle of bushes and vines and there was trash everywhere,” said
Morgan. Now it’s been cleaned up and properly marked which is indicative of the
respect that the graves deserve.”
Binyard was born a slave on Edgerly Plantation in
1840. After he was freed from slavery in 1863, Binyard joined the Union Army’s
U.S. Colored Troops Division and was among the first African-American men to
join the Army in South Carolina. Binyard and his family bought a piece of land
on Edgerly Plantation in 1866 after he left the Army which is now the site of
the cemetery.
In addition to her
role in the clean-up, Morgan was also responsible for discovering Binyard’s
grave and tracing his family tree to living descendants. Her research led her
to Akosua Moore, a descendant of the Edgerly Plantation who was researching her
family tree at the same time as Morgan. Moore was able to get many relatives of
the Binyard family, and other Edgerly Plantation descendants, to attend the
ceremony.
“This gathering is huge because there are
people here that you can’t see,” said Moore. “I know our ancestors are here
with us today.”
The whole project
began in 2013 when Morgan began doing the research and soon it became a very
personal project to her. She reached out to Moore later that year and shared
the information she found about Moore’s family.
“It’s hard to put
into words,” said Morgan. “I’m just so proud and really happy that this day
came. When I went into the woods and found the grave, it was an incredibly
emotional moment for me. Over the years, I feel like I have grown closer to
Stephen (Binyard) as a person and now I can become closer to our whole family.”
The clean-up work
officially began in September 2014 when Morgan convinced the Cultural Resource
Team to assist with her mission.
“He deserved
better than the state of his grave so the first step had to be getting it
cleaned up,” said Gary Herndon, the Cultural Resources Manager aboard MCAS
Beaufort. “We had to find a way to better preserve his memory. As Kimberly
found more and more facts about his family it became more important to us to
honor his resting place.”
Seeing the
restored gravesite of their ancestor brought bitter-sweet tears to many family
members. Honoring Binyard’s burial place is just the first step towards an
ambitious goal.
“This isn’t the
end of the journey,” said Morgan. “We plan to do some more landscaping in the
fall once the weather gets cooler and the bugs and snakes go away. We are going
to put down some mulch around the graves, plant some flowers, and possibly put
a bench overlooking the creek.”
Morgan and Herndon
also have plans to begin work on other cemeteries located aboard MCAS Beaufort.
“The next place we
plan on cleaning up is the baker cemetery across from Afterburners,” said
Herndon. “There are still a lot of people in the Beaufort area that have their
family buried here and we want to give them the respect they deserve.”
Morgan’s
dedication and perseverance has brought long lost family members back together
while restoring a piece of history.
“My parents taught
me to treat other people the way you want to be treated,” said Morgan. “If
somebody found my great grandfather’s grave hidden in the woods I hope that they
would treat it with honor and respect.”
One of the
greatest outcomes of the work of Kimberly Morgan and Akosua Moore may be the
friendship that has been forged between them.
Being a math
teacher, I know parallel lines don’t intersect,” said Moore. “Somehow,
Kimberly’s line and my line intersected in 2013 and got us working on this
project. We are family now.”