Offensive historic headstones to be replaced

Supervisors in El Dorado County voted on Tuesday to right a historic wrong by replacing 36 cemetery headstones that the US Army Corps of Engineers labeled with a racist slur in 1954. When the Corps built Folsom Dam on the American River that year, it moved remains from a cemetery in the old Gold Rush town of Negro Hill to a new resting place in El Dorado County. The N-word was stamped into concrete headstones instead of "Negro" to note the anonymous remains had come from the former Negro Hill Cemetery.



But the supervisors' 5-0 vote to allow a privately funded project to replace the headstones at Mormon Island Cemetery stirred debate. African American ministers expressed concern over discussion to include one of the headstones with the epithet in a proposed monument to Negro Hill, a multi-racial community that once thrived with gold seekers, and to acknowledge the graves' removal and the Corps' use of the inflammatory term.

Some supervisors took offence over a suggestion that some of the stones be sent to the Smithsonian or to universities as history of racism in America. Responding to a public records request, the Army Corps of Engineers released documents acknowledging it was responsible for using the N-word when referring to Negro Hill on the grave markers as well as photos, maps and contracts for the 1954 project.


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"We don't know why, when in so many other instances the cemetery was called Negro Hill, the new gravestones and our records used the more offensive word," wrote Corps Lt. Andrew B. Kiger in releasing the documents. Under a proposal before the county, $18,000 in private funds will be raised to pay for granite for headstones to be replaced by the California Prison Industry Authority. Another $5,000 will go to a still-unspecified monument at the site honouring the people of Negro Hill and the anonymous residents now buried at the Mormon Island location.