Sumter County issued the following announcement on Jan. 26.
New Veteran Administration (VA) markers also were installed for Peter and James Weeks at the cemetery as the original VA markers were vandalized. The National Parks Service officially listed Wild Cow Prairie Cemetery on the National Register of Historic Places on February 2, 2021.
A joint project by the Young Performing Artists Inc., Historian Della Daughtry with the Sumter County Preservation Society and Sumter County worked to identify the total number of unmarked graves that lie within and near the boundaries of the cemetery. Central Testing Laboratory (CTL) hired GeoView Inc. to conduct a ground penetrating radar (GPR) survey. The cemetery has 16 marked graves and 28 unmarked graves. Of those, 15 are considered shrouded burials, which are people wrapped in sheets with no casket. There are 29 casket graves. Several graves were detected beyond the cemetery borders.
For years, the Wild Cow Prairie Cemetery was considered a small family cemetery, but the site actually holds a combination of plots consisting of slave descendants from the Green Plantation, descendants from Pemberton Ferry (later known as Pemberton), military veterans, and early civic leaders such as James Weeks and Charles Littleberry Branch, both former Sumter County Commissioners.
Wild Cow Prairie Cemetery sits at the southeast corner of Interstate 75 and County Road 673 near the Croom Wildlife Management Area.
Original source can be found here.
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