UAH Campus Structures Map

The physical superposition of UAH over the Jones plantation landscape is what the thesis calls collective forgetting by omission — managing an inconvenient past not by denial but by what gets preserved and what gets cleared away. Nowhere is this more visible than at the Perkins-Jones Cemetery, where patriotic narratives commemorate white Revolutionary service while adjacent enslaved burial sites remain unmarked and anonymous. Documented.

Behind Morton Hall, box graves and two headstones remained physically visible and publicly describable by 2021 — without institutional identification of their occupants. The Perkins-Jones Cemetery transcription, compiled in 2012 from fieldwork and a 1978 survey, records a grave sink reported forty-four years before UAH's formal archaeology announcement: the absence of institutional acknowledgment was never a function of physical invisibility. Documented.

Ground-penetrating radar has been part of the record too — and part of its cautionary tale. UAH's May 2022 GPR scan is documented, but no 2017 survey report and no corroboration of the reported “approximately 60 possible grave anomalies south of campus along Ben Graves Drive” could be located, and a September 2026 assessment reports no grave-pattern anomalies near the known cemetery. Those figures remain Unverified — and this project does not pin unverified anomalies to the map above.

The 1860 slave-schedule manuscript for Alexander P. Jones, read entry by entry, gives 96 enslaved people at Avalon; his total 1860 holdings across all schedule entries were 106 (schedule p. 483) — the figure UAH's 2019 announcement repeated without the distinction; the 1850 schedule gives 139. UAH's 2019 announcement documented 35 associated structures on the site, yet institutional expansion in the 1960s reduced surviving markers to a small fraction of that population. Documented.

The 1992 Harvie Jones Architectural Survey of the Drake-Garth Jones farm meticulously documents federal-period brickwork while noting, almost in passing, that “old servants' quarters … have long ago been cleared away.” A survey trained to preserve brick and mortar found nothing worth preserving in the buildings where enslaved people actually lived — a modern act of selective preservation that finalizes, in the present tense, the physical erasure of enslaved labor. Documented.

The relocation of Union Chapel to the UAH campus in the 1970s shows how unstable institutional memory can be: the donor sign records a circa-1840 church moved from near Hazel Green in January 1974 — verified firsthand — yet the structure has been variously labeled an early African chapel, dated to the 1820s, and described as a small Cumberland Presbyterian church. Those labels were not verified as a set. Documented in part; labels unverified.

State-sponsored infrastructure finished what selective preservation started: the 1941–42 displacement for the Huntsville Arsenal removed roughly 550 to 600 families and destroyed Black churches and schools — Horton School, Silver Hill School (Rosenwald schools), and Cedar Grove Church — that had served as the community's primary institutional record-keepers. Documented (the TVA's specific role remains flagged for further verification).

UAH's 2019 and 2022 public statements confirm awareness of the site's history while neither announcing completion of the proposed monument and footpath nor explaining their status. The sharpest assessment of that condition — paraphrased here, since the verbatim wording could not be matched to a confirmed source — is that the university does not so much hide the site as fail to acknowledge it: not concealment, which would at least imply someone worked to keep a secret, but a sustained failure to say a true thing out loud, year after year, until silence itself becomes the institutional position.