Plans to build a $400 million grain elevator would disrupt Black burial grounds and educational sites about slavery. propublica
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An agricultural company called Greenfield had purchased the land for $40 million in 2021 and is seeking a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers to build a massive industrial operation that would include 54 grain silos. A long conveyor would carry millions of tons of wheat, soy and other crops to the facility from ships docked on the river.
The determination of the historic district, the findings about the impact on Whitney and the community around it, and the lone sentence about unknown graves had all been removed. The report now concluded that “the project would not result in an adverse effect.” The company says it asked Edwards to provide additional evidence to support her conclusion that the area should be considered an historic district, but she “was unable to provide data needed to meet the referenced listing criteria.” Edwards, who has a master’s degree in preservation from Tulane, said that she was confident her report was comprehensive and that the state’s historic preservation office would have agreed, had that agency been sent the complete report.
“There is little incentive for companies to find anything,” explained Tom King, who during the 80s was the director of the federal Office of Cultural Resource Preservation, under the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. “They’re not hired to find things. If they make construction impossible, they are not going to get more work.”
Three decades ago, another company had nearly begun building a plant on the same land. She’d prepared to leave. But the plans were scrapped. “If we had to move all of a sudden that would be something. I’ve been here. My daddy was living right there,” Grows said. “All these people on this little land are kinfolk.”
Gray, who worked for eight years for a private cultural resource management firm in Louisiana before he got a doctorate in archaeology at the University of Chicago, concluded that the Willow Grove Cemetery likely extends beyond what is visible. The land around it, he wrote, is “almost positively the location” of “unmarked enslaved or nineteenth-century post-Emancipation burials.”
Edwards said she raised the issue of unknown graves in the hopes it would spur the Division of Historic Preservation to demand that Greenfield conduct a more diligent search for unmarked burial sites, including near the Willow Grove Cemetery. Last year, the Whitney Plantation Museum, which decades ago was added to the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places, put up a new plaque on the museum premises.
After both sisters left Wallace for college and graduate school, and in Joy’s case to get a doctorate and then teach at a university in Texas, they returned to work in this small community. Like many residents, they trace their ancestry to people who were enslaved in these very plantations, including Whitney.
After the beams were pounded into the ground, lawyers with the Center for Constitutional Rights who represent the Descendants Project sent a letter to the Louisiana attorney general and the Louisiana Division of Archaeology, requesting that they force the activity to stop. The attorney general’s office replied to the letter from the Descendants Projects’ lawyers. “While some of the anomalies identified in your letter may represent unmarked burial sites,” it said, “so long as they are undisturbed we cannot take action under the existing laws.” Unless bones were dug up, in other words, under Louisiana’s cemetery laws, the state could not stop the work.
Among the claims in the suit, the Descendants Project says that the sprawling operation could pose a risk to their own ancestors’ graves. The sisters aim to preserve the land to serve Black communities who have lived here for hundreds of years yet have been robbed of their claim to it by those who controlled it.
After Edwards quit her job at Gulf South, she felt compelled to tell the state what had happened. On Oct. 22, 2021, she emailed the director of the Louisiana Division of Historic Preservation, stating that the report she had drafted, and a set of accompanying forms, are “very different from the current version that should be coming to you soon.”
Community input allows for “those preservation laws to be applied in a more equitable way,” Gray said, “to understand integrity differently.”
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