Clifts Plantation Burial Ground
Who Was Buried Here?
The Clifts Plantation cemetery was located on the opposite side of the current road. Because of long distances to the nearest church in the 17th and early 18th centuries, plantation burial grounds were common in the Chesapeake region.
Archaeologists found 17 burials in the cemetery - seven white and ten black. In the early 18th century, wealthy planters throughout the Chesapeake turned increasingly from white to enslaved black labor. To a large extent, the switch from indentured whites to black slaves working on Virginia plantations resulted from a decline in the number of Europeans willing to leave home and a rise in the trade of enslaved Africans.
The burials at the Clifts site followed the typical European practice of placing the dead in a shroud and coffin.
Marker can be reached from Great House Road.
Courtesy hmdb.org
