BRYAN, Texas — In Bryan, you’ll find African American history on display… with the exhibit “Down into Canaan” — a cemetery where the lives of many African Americans were buried since the 1870s.
The Canaan Cemetery sits off Highway 21, west of the Texas A&M RELLIS Campus.
There lies the lives of many Black farmers from the 1800s.
Raschelle Black with Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) stumbled across this gem of land when fulfilling a request on FindAGrave.
“Some family members requested photos of headstones, so I went out there one day to try to find the headstone and take a photo for them,” said Raschelle Black, Historic Preservation Chair, Daughters of the American Revolution, Come and Take It Chapter.
“I could not find it. When I pulled up, me and my husband went out there, and it was just trees, brush, just solid brush.”
Barry Davis with the Brazos Valley African American Museum has a display on the Canaans where research shows who the Canaans were and how they came to Bryan.
“Because you have people that have been buried in there since about the 1870s,” said Barry Davis, Board of Directors, Interim Museum Director, Brazos Valley African American Museum.
“You have people in the cemetery that served in the Confederate War, World War I, World War II.”
Acres covered in history — 430 people buried in this cemetery and only 180 of those have been identified.
“This is where people got the opportunity after the Civil War to start acquiring some land through some of it being given to us, some of it being sold, and some of it through share cropping and some of it just working the land,” Davis said.
Black collaborated with JustServe, a service provided by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, to hand-clear the brush.
“The main cemetery is five acres,” Black said. “We’ve been working on it for two years now. We are down to the last bit now.”
Jim Matis with just serve says a youth group came to help restore the cemetery, along with the efforts of family members both local and out of state.
“How special it was for them because there was some fenced areas that they cleared and before, you couldn’t see a headstone there at all and they cleared that,” said James “Jim” Matis, with JustServe.
“All cemeteries need to be preserved, and this just so happened to be a cemetery that was located in an all-Black community,” Davis said.
Now as a community, they are making a difference.
“The satisfaction of honoring those people who were lost all that time and now have been located and honored and now the sun is shining on their tombstones,” Matis said.
The Canaan Cemetery was long neglected but never forgotten.
Black says the hope is to fully restore the land and return it to family by November of this year.
If you would like to help with cleanup efforts and restoration of the cemetery, visit JustServe herefor more details and volunteer sign up.