Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources now oversees a sacred burial ground where enslaved ironworkers from the 1700s are interred, following a land donation that adds the historic cemetery to Cunningham Falls State Park.
The two-acre African American cemetery in Frederick County serves as the final resting place for skilled workers who labored at the Catoctin Furnace, which operated during America’s founding era.
State officials held a ceremony on February 28 at the historic Harriet Chapel, a church that never practiced segregation, to mark the land transfer from the Catoctin Furnace Historical Society. Family members descended from those buried at the site attended the solemn gathering during Black History Month…