Estimates suggest that over 15,000 people are buried at East End Cemetery, a historic African American cemetery in Richmond, Virginia, that until recently received no public funding for upkeep. Here, we present a case study analysis and potentially replicable methodology for counting and locating unmarked burial depressions in non-forested areas using a low-cost sUAV (drone) and simple, hydrology-based geographic information systems analyses. Upon visual inspection of 12% of our final 8,000 burial site dataset, we find our dataset is a plausible representation (75% accuracy) of potential grave locations. We hope that the methods presented below can be implemented to assist in reclaiming historically underfunded Black cemeteries across the American South.

Duplicate sentences are found in the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs of the Concluding Remarks section.The original article has been corrected.

In 1834 the rector of St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Burlington, New Jersey desired to place a cross atop his newly-refurbished sanctuary. No ordinary rector, George Washington Doane also served as the Episcopal bishop of New Jersey. Shortly after taking charge of St. Mary's in 1833, he and his vestry had decided to renovate their old church, and their ambitious new design featured a cruciform plan with Greek details, including a pediment adorned with lotus leaves and a tower “derived from that built at Athens… commonly called the Tower of the Winds.” But when Doane carried out the plans for “an enriched Greek Cross” to be mounted on the roof, the community stood aghast. A local Presbyterian minister chronicled the confrontation, and he began by asserting that most of St. Mary's vestrymen had originally approved the designs without “noticing the Cross at the time.” The project was thus completed, and to the vestry's “great surprise, as well as that of many in the community, of all ‘denominations’—lo! a Cross made quite a Catholic appearance on the apex of the pediment!” Controversy arose, “both in the Vestry and out of it,” and “after a very warm meeting, one of the Vestry shortly after declared that unless the Cross was taken down very soon, it should be pulled down.”

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