What UAH Knew: A Burial Timeline
A dated, sourced sequence of what the University of Alabama in Huntsville — and the institution that became it — knew about burials and graves on the campus land it built on. The earliest warning arrived before the campus did.
A genealogist warns the University Center about the graveyard in the construction footprint Documented
Kathleen Paul Jones — a genealogist and co-compiler of the Alabama Records volumes — wrote to Dr. Philip M. Mason, the University Center official overseeing plans for the Huntsville campus, after her son Harvie Jones showed her the model layout: "When our son, Harvie Jones, showed me the model lay-out of the University Center, I asked 'What are you going to do with Lewellen Jones?'" She asked what would become of the Lewellen Jones graveyard sitting in the construction footprint, and urged that if the university preserved the plot, it note that Lewellen Jones lies there. Source: Frances Cabaniss Roberts Collection, Ser. 4, Subser. B, Box 1, Folder 12, "Jones, Lewellen (UAH) Grave – Families," UAH Archives. Caution: a transcription file is mislabeled "1968" — the scan image clearly reads June 1, 1958, and the image is authoritative. The letter asks about the graveyard's fate against the construction model; it does not say "you are building over burials" verbatim.
The follow-up: an assurance, and a wider warning Documented
Jones wrote Mason again, thanking him — "it is good to know the old graveyard will be cared for" — which implies he replied with an assurance. She widened the warning beyond the one graveyard: other Revolutionary soldiers' resting places were "about to be engulfed by progress." Source: same Roberts Collection folder. What Mason's reply actually promised is not in the file.
Morton Hall rises on the flagged ground Documented
In spring 1958, Huntsville offered the university 83 acres for the new campus. Construction of the central building was completed in December 1960 at a cost of $728,142.43 (architect W.R. Dickson), and the building was formally designated Morton Hall on May 7, 1961, honoring John R. Morton. The building went up on the ground the June 1958 letters had flagged. Source: Kai Williams, Fall 2024 "Huntsville Then and Now" exhibit, UAH Archives digital collections.
A grave sink — an unmarked grave — recorded at the campus cemetery Documented
A public cemetery survey recorded "one grave sink… indicating an unmarked grave" at what is now the Perkins-Jones Cemetery on the UAH campus — observed in the field and written down decades before any university archaeology. The observation is now attested online: an independent surveyor's page (photos September 2012, published March 2014) attributes the sink to Dorothy Johnson's 1978 survey and notes it has since been filled in — a visual observation, not a GPR anomaly. The same survey transcribed all four standing markers: Lewellen Jones (1760–1820), Maria Latetia Perkins (1823–1852), Washington Layfayett Perkins (1827–1849, "aged 21 years, 11 months and 19 days"), and Alexander Spotswood Perkins (1831–1867) — and documents a second campus cemetery, the "Jones (Mary) Cemetery" near the daycare playground, kept distinct from the Perkins-Jones cemetery. Source: Wayne Austin's Perkins-Jones Cemetery survey page (built from Dorothy Johnson's survey records). Published location claims: Find a Grave's "Perkins Cemetery in Huntsville" (ID 25349) lists 34.73220, −86.64250; the independent survey gives N 34.73237, W 86.64207. Both are published claims, not project-surveyed coordinates.
UAH Archives photographs the "Jones family cemetery" behind Morton Hall Documented
The university's own archives documented the cemetery's existence and on-campus location — the earliest institutional acknowledgment found. The description does not mention enslaved burials. The Archives' own record shows the photograph was later re-digitized for the 2019 monument project — the institution treating its own cemetery photo as monument documentation. Source: UAH Archives digital collection, "Jones family cemetery" (identifier uah_uahp_0000014; relation field uah_uahp_2019_04).
UAH announces a two-sided cemetery monument — then the announcement disappears Documented
UAH News published "UAH Archives and Department of History to Erect Historical Marker on Campus," announcing plans "to erect a two-sided historical monument on campus to commemorate those who resided and worked on the land which UAH now stands" — for the Avalon plantation-house site and the Jones-Perkins Family Cemetery, "which can be seen behind Morton Hall and next to Union Grove Gallery," sited "along a well-traveled footpath between Morton Hall and Union Grove Gallery with clear views of the cemetery." The team: Drew Adan, Vaughn Bocchino, Christine Sears. Adan: "Many members of the UAH community are unaware that one of the largest plantations in Madison County was right here on campus." The announcement page now returns a 404 — deleted — and no completion of the monument, or the planned fall dedication, was ever announced anywhere. The full text was recovered from search-engine cache; Under investigation — no genuine Wayback Machine capture has been retrieved yet.
First marker installed; the framing gets reconsidered Documented
The first "Avalon Plantation & Cemetery" marker was completed in spring 2020 with the Huntsville Madison County Historical Society — then paused and reconsidered after 2020's events, for centering the enslaver narrative. Source: Christine Sears, November 10, 2020 Alabama Historical Association panel transcript.
A three-marker interpretive trail is planned — including the cemetery Documented
At the same AHA panel, Drew Adan described a planned three-marker interpretive trail with the first marker at the Jones Cemetery behind Morton Hall — institutional engagement with the cemetery as public history, including internal debate over how to frame it. Source: "2020 and the Future of Alabama History: The Avalon Plantation Marker Story" panel transcript.
Local TV puts the burials in the news — and pins the ~60 figure to media coverage Documented
Stefante Randall's WAFF 48 Black History Month story, "Black History Month: Uncovering the history of unmarked slave graves at UAH," interviewed UAH history student Emily Therrell. It reported a separate 2017 GPR survey between Roberts Hall, the Nursing School, and the Jones Perkins Family Cemetery — aimed at detecting enslaved housing, not graves, and yielding animal bones, glass bricks, and a horseshoe from stable keeping — and it is the earliest located source for the figure of about 60 possible graves just south of campus on Ben Graves Drive, pinning that number's public circulation to media coverage rather than a published UAH survey. The story also records a UAH history-department committee to erect historical monuments and a fund for additional research, and Therrell's verdict: "It's not that UAH tries to hide it, but they don't acknowledge it." Source: WAFF 48, Feb. 21, 2022 ↗. Keep the 2017 housing survey distinct from the May 2022 TVAR scan.
UAH hires archaeologists to hunt unmarked enslaved burials — and never publishes what they found Documented
UAH's own news site announced that History and Archives, with the Provost's Office, had hired Tennessee Valley Archaeological Research — Claiborne Sea, a University of Alabama archaeology doctoral student and GPR specialist, spent three days in mid-May scanning two areas with ground-penetrating radar "in an attempt to locate where enslaved people were laid to rest on the property": one near University Drive, one around "the existing Jones-Perkins Cemetery behind Morton Hall." It closed: "We can't wait to see what his work shows!" — results explicitly pending. UAH never published the results. No anomaly counts, no follow-up, nothing — and the May 2022 article remains the only public record of the survey, absent even from TVAR's own project pages. TVAR was the established local firm for this work: in 2021 it ran GPR at Huntsville's Glenwood Cemetery and identified 27 unmarked graves. The article also repeats the figure of 106 enslaved people held on Avalon by 1860 — the widely circulated number, which collapses two different manuscript figures: the project's row-by-row reading of the 1860 schedule gives 96 at Avalon specifically, while the 106 is Alexander P. Jones's total 1860 holdings across all his schedule entries (schedule p. 483). The article reports neither distinction. Source: UAH news, May 16, 2022 ↗. September 2026 checks pinned the firm's identity and tested its own record. Tennessee Valley Archaeological Research of Huntsville — a woman-owned cultural-resource-management firm — has a LinkedIn-verified roster: Hunter Johnson (President), Kate Manning (Principal Investigator and Field Coordinator), Travis Rael (Laboratory Director), and Ashley Stewart (Bioarchaeologist). The social record is a negative: zero posts on the company page, zero posts on the personnel profiles, and no publicly visible Facebook post about the May 2022 survey or any mandible. The named surveyor, Claiborne Sea, is not listed in TVAR's company roster; his independent profile places him as a University of Alabama PhD candidate, formerly with CDSea Consulting and now with ArchaeoSpatial Analytics. The survey's only other public trace: a May 17, 2022 Jackson County Historical Association Facebook post — "UAH is doing its best to locate grave sites in a grid analysis" — 54 likes, one day after UAH's announcement. No UAH publication of a 2018 GPR survey could be located at all.
Correspondence on the mandible and the GPR record Correspondence — not an inspected report
Correspondence to this project reports that the mandible found on campus was likely redeposited during earlier construction, later exposed by erosion, and found by grounds staff — and that the GPR survey found no grave-pattern anomalies at the known Jones Cemetery, with north-entrance anomalies not replicating in a second survey. This is correspondence and context, not an inspected underlying GPR report; the survey reports themselves remain unlocated in UAH's public record.
The shape of the record
Read straight through, the timeline shows an institution that was told — repeatedly, in writing, across decades — and chose not to act: a warning received in 1958, a cemetery photographed in 1988, a monument announced in 2019 and then quietly deleted, a 2022 archaeological survey whose results were never published. Whether each silence was deliberate or merely negligent, the pattern is the same: the university knew, and the public was not told. Each entry is checkable. The silence between them is the argument.
The land-and-capital side of institutional knowledge — the Willie Jones homestead, the condemnation, the university fund — is tracked separately on What UAH & Huntsville Knew. The campus landscape itself is mapped on the UAH Campus Map.
What the sister campus did
UAH does not have to guess what institutional reckoning looks like — the flagship campus already did it. A fully sourced student study, Ford Mozingo's “The Changing Nature of Slavery at the University of Alabama, 1828–1865” (Crimson Historical Review), documents thirty-seven years of enslaved labor at the University of Alabama: enslaved people built the majority of campus construction in its first decade; the state ordered Isaac Winston to sell an enslaved man, Lawrence, to the trustees (1831); enslaved carpenters William and Anderson were hired in 1841 and 1843 — William and Willis laid 30,750 shingles in a single month, July 1846 — and professor George Benagh traveled to Virginia in 1853 with $7,000 to buy enslaved people, while Sally was rented from Mrs. Comegys. The work, Mozingo notes, was done “in a manner as thorough and as cheap as possible.” Named individuals — Lawrence, William, Anderson, Willis, Sam, Morgan, York, Wash, Lewis, Dan, Sally — are in the primary sources with dollar figures attached. Read the study (PDF).
In 2004, UA's faculty passed a resolution formally acknowledging and apologizing for the university's history with slavery. That is the in-system precedent: the same university system, a documented slavery history, a formal institutional apology. Documented (Mozingo; UA faculty records).
Against that precedent, UAH's burial record reads as a choice: the 2019 monument announcement deleted, the 2022 GPR results unpublished, the cemetery still unmarked for the enslaved people it holds. The question this timeline leaves open is not whether the university knew — it is what it did with what it knew.