In 1864 with the cemeteries full, the federal government seized property on the corner of Washington and Church Streets for a freedmen’s burial ground. By 1869 more than eighteen hundred freedmen had found their final resting place at the cemetery; more than half of those buried were children. But the African American cemetery did not receive the same care as the white national cemetery. After the war, the government maintained the cemetery for a decade or so, but soon the wooden markers rotted away, and everyone forgot that the site was a cemetery. By the time I was born, a service station
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