Developers found graves in Virginia's woods. Authorities then helped erase the historic black cemetery.

Mike and David Moseley visit the headstone of one of their ancestors, Stephen Moseley.

The cemetery's disappearance cleared the way for Microsoft's data center expansion, despite a host of federal and state regulations nominally designed to protect culturally significant sites.

No one working on a $346 million Microsoft project in rural Virginia expected to find graves in the woods. But in the thickets of yucca and cedar that needed to be cleared, surveyors stumbled upon a cemetery. On the largest of the stones, in a layer of cracked plaster, was written the name Stephen Moseley: "Died December 3, 1930." Another stone, in almost perfect condition, with an engraved branch on top, belonged to Stephen's young son, Fred, who died in 1906.

"It's not as bad as it looks," a consulting engineer wrote in March 2014 to Microsoft and a Mecklenburg County, Virginia, official who was helping to overcome obstacles to the project, a major data center expansion. "We should be able to move those graves."

Mecklenburg County, along with Microsoft and a couple of consulting firms, immediately launched a campaign to downplay the cemetery's significance. The most immediate concern was to make sure that the cemetery would not be added to the National Register of Historic Places, a list of sites worthy of protection compiled by the federal government. Such inclusion would likely trigger a state-supervised archaeological investigation and force developers to stay away from the graves. Without such recognition, the cemetery could be relocated with relative ease.

After discovering the cemetery, the county and its consultants contacted archaeologists, whom they were required by federal law to engage. But it didn't go as they had hoped. In a detailed report, the archaeologists determined that the cemetery was "eligible for inclusion" in the historic register. The report emphasized the importance of the cemetery to the life and death of African Americans in southern Virginia, citing the fact that Stephen Moseley and his relatives were black. "It is recommended that this site be avoided," the report said.

For the district and its consultants, whose costs are covered by Microsoft, it was unacceptable. "We will be challenging his recommendations," wrote Alexis Jones, a consultant with the firm Enviro-Utilities.

The firm and the county insisted that the archaeologists rescind their conclusion that the cemetery should be listed on the National Register. They asked the team to question the main conclusion that made the cemetery historically significant: all of the people buried there - members of the post-Civil War and Reconstruction tobacco-growing landowner community - were black.

The archaeologists honored only the last request. They redacted their report, adding, "It cannot be ruled out that the burials are associated with white tenant farmers." But when they sent Jones and her supervisor the revised report, they acknowledged that the new claim was dubious: "All evidence currently available suggests" that the cemetery was the last resting place of the African-American community, they wrote.

One of the archaeologists, David Dutton, told ProPublica, "We didn't exhume any bodies. We didn't do any DNA analysis. We haven't done any analysis. So can we claim 100 percent? After all, this is archaeology, you don't know until you know."

Jones and her colleagues still wanted to deny eligibility for the historic register, so they sent the report to another archaeologist to get a second opinion. But the archaeologist disagreed and rejected the idea that some of the people buried there might be white. "Under Jim Crow, whites and blacks would not have been buried so close together," he wrote.

He suggested the original firm conduct additional historical research. "Additional work needs to be done with members of the Moseley family to determine who lies in the graves," he wrote in an e-mail to Jones' supervisor, who forwarded it to the county.

The County and its consultants ignored this advice.

Virginia law required the county to publish the legal notice among the notices and advertisements in several weekly print editions of The Mecklenburg Sun newspaper. But even that, Jones warned in an e-mail to Microsoft and the county, "risks" "the chance of some local relative showing up."

In the second week of the ad, in November 2014, the newspaper ran a front-page story about a controversy over new helmets for the high school soccer team following the death of a player from blunt force trauma. The article ran under the headline "Mike Moseley." Moseley is a staff writer. He is also the great-grandson of Stephen Moseley.

"The Moseleys have lived here for a long time," Mike Moseley says of his family's roots in this part of Virginia.

When asked if he had seen an ad in the pages of his newspaper, he said, "Do you read ads and advertisements? No".

Mike Moseley wouldn't be hard to find if the county actually tried to track down descendants of Stephen Moseley. The tall, lanky 60-year-old man attended high school in Mecklenburg County and played basketball on his high school team. After graduation, he left for a while - he didn't want to follow his father into the funeral business - but returned to Mecklenburg more than two decades ago. Since then, he has worked for local newspapers, including the Sun, where he is still a reporter.

"Everyone who works in the county knows me," he said. "They know who we are. It's hard to understand how they haven't come to talk to us."

Mike and David Moseley

Mecklenburg County did not respond to detailed questions about its handling of the cemetery or the contents of the emails, which were obtained through a state public records request. But in a telephone interview, County Administrator Wayne Carter said the newspaper notice was sufficient to comply with the law. He added that he asked people who hunt the area if they had noticed anyone in the cemetery. "They haven't seen anyone there," Carter said.

Jones, the consultant, declined to answer questions and referred them to Microsoft. Enviro-Utilities did not respond to e-mailed questions or to multiple calls and text messages. In response to questions, a Microsoft spokesman said the "district has followed all applicable federal, state and local laws."

Like his nephew, David Moseley has heard nothing from county officials about the threat to the cemetery. The mild-mannered schoolteacher and retired administrator, now 85, grew up on land adjacent to the Microsoft data center site and now lives outside Lynchburg, Virginia. "Yes," he said when asked in August about the resting place of his relatives, "there is a cemetery there. At first, he didn't believe the remains of his grandfather, Stephen Moseley, were anywhere else. "Someone would call me if the cemetery was moved," he said.

Plaques and pen found during an archaeological dig at the Moseley family cemetery

For months after the ad was published in The Mecklenburg Sun newspaper, workers continued to find graves, eventually finding 37. Some plots were marked with pieces of quartz or yucca plants, which were used by many southern black families who had no money for stones. Each burial added several days to the dig, to the frustration of the county and its consultants. The team excavated each grave, collecting bones, coffin fragments, metal knobs and hinges, engraved epitaph plaques, a pair of eyeglasses, and an ivory comb. The remains and other items were packed in plastic crates and placed in the office. A few months later, it was all reburied in four tightly packed $500 cemetery plots in a town to the north.

David Moseley's grandparents, Stephen and Lucy Moseley, and great-grandparents, James and Ellen Walker, purchased 169 acres of land in 1899 in a fertile area near the North Carolina border. His father, Douglas Moseley, inherited the Moseley homestead, and as a teenager, David would wake up early in the morning to join his uncle in harvesting tobacco. As far as David knew, his ancestors were buried on the land. In one of his earliest memories, when he was about four years old, he traveled with his parents to the cemetery to bury his stillborn sibling. "I remember being there and seeing an open grave," he said.

David, as well as his last living sister Christine Moseley, their children, nephews and nieces still own the 83-acre eastern half of the property they call "the farm." The family sold the neighboring lot, now owned by Microsoft, generations ago; David says his family made a handshake agreement with the white men who bought the other half of the property that allowed the Moseley's to continue visiting graves. Today, the farm is surrounded on nearly all sides by land zoned for industrial use, including three of the 17 parcels Microsoft has purchased in Mecklenburg County to permanently expand its data center. From time to time, David Moseley or his niece, who lives outside Washington, D.C., receives an offer to buy the remaining land. Sometimes the correspondence is signed by Wayne Carter, the county administrator who oversaw the permitting process for Microsoft's data center.

"If they could find us to buy the land," David said, sitting at the dining room table next to a stack of family property papers, "why can't they find us for the cemetery?"

The relocated headstone of Fred D. Moseley, who died in 1906 at the age of 2 years.

The disappearance of the cemetery was in defiance of a host of federal and state regulations nominally designed to protect such places and to facilitate consultation with people who might be interested in what happens to historic sites.

But in Virginia, as in most other states, the power over what ultimately happens to these sites often rests with whoever owns the land. And the labor of investigating what might make a site historic is often left to commercial archaeological firms working for property owners who have an interest in finding as little as possible.

"We are one of the only developed countries in the world that considers archaeological sites on private property to be private property rather than cultural heritage," says Fred McGee, Ph.D., an African-American archaeologist working in a predominantly white field.

"Black historic sites are among the first to be reviled," he said.

African-American cemeteries that are considered abandoned or neglected are usually treated as little more than a nuisance to development. Historic preservation laws and regulations rarely protect them.

On the University of Georgia campus, construction workers discovered a cemetery of enslaved men, and in 2017 the remains were reportedly loaded onto a truck and reburied "in secret," according to a faculty review. In Texas in 2018, builders discovered the cemetery of dozens of men held as convicts - a site whose significance had long been known to community members - and the remains were exhumed. In each case, the developers said they treated the burials with dignity.

Earlier this year, agricultural company Greenfield LLC applied for a federal permit to build a grain handling facility the size of the Statue of Liberty on 248 acres along the Mississippi River in Louisiana. The archaeological firm initially concluded that several notable black historic sites would be threatened by the construction, including a restored plantation that serves as a memorial to enslaved people. But in May, ProPublica revealed that the firm had changed its report and retracted that conclusion after pressure from its client. At the time, the company told ProPublica that no one forced it to make the changes and that the report itself was a draft, noting that drafts are often changed "after being reviewed by clients."

Without consulting the communities that live near the development site and trace their lineage back to people enslaved on the same land, the Army Corps of Engineers, which is reviewing the permit, allowed Greenfield to drive huge metal beams into a sugarcane field - even before the Corps signed off on the project. Researchers and members of the public said the field likely contains unmarked graves of people who were held as slaves. Greenfield has said it considers protecting historic sites a priority and will halt construction if such sites are discovered.

For decades, the Army Corps has been criticized by other federal agencies, advocates, and community and tribal organizations for failing to engage with project-affected groups about potential damage to cultural sites, as required by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966.

"In theory, the Army Corps or any other federal agency issuing a permit should have told developers that descendants needed to be identified and interviewed and their views taken into account," says J.W. Joseph, an archaeologist with New South Associates, a cultural resource research firm in Georgia that has conducted archaeological work at dozens of cemeteries, often as part of projects governed by federal law.
"Too often it doesn't happen."

In Mecklenburg County, before Microsoft took ownership of the land - free of charge, with significant tax incentives and state funds earmarked for the development of troubled tobacco-growing regions - the Army Corps raised no concerns about the project's compliance with the Heritage Preservation Act. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources, charged with enforcing state and federal preservation laws, also made no effort to protect the site. (The department has said it has never denied landowners permission to rebury, and preservation experts say Virginia judges almost never do so either.)

The Army Corps and the Department of Historic Resources facilitated the legal destruction of the cemetery. The graves were dug in near silence.

"While it is the Department's position that decedents should remain undisturbed," said a spokesperson for the Department of Historic Resources, "we also realize that this is not always possible.

After receiving a permit from the state Department of Historic Resources to excavate, Microsoft, Mecklenburg County and its consultants had little interest in anything other than speed and cost. The spring of 2015 was rainy and the ground was soaking wet. The graves that the excavation crew opened sometimes filled with water. According to one of the crew members, Eric Mai, who recently started a master's program in archaeology, the already fragile remains were further deteriorating-sometimes for days in the wet mud.

Everyone realized it was the wrong time to work. "Conditions at the site are as bad as they could ever be for exhumation," Jones, the consultant, wrote to Microsoft and the county explaining why the excavation had taken longer than expected. "It's disgusting sticky wet clay," she said of the soil that decades ago provided the basis for fertile tobacco crops. But Jones stepped on the gas. "You need to find extra help and work seven days a week until it's done."

The remains "were saturated and in very poor condition," according to a report from the firm hired to conduct the excavation, Circa-Cultural Resource Management LLC. The Department of Historical Resources agreed with Circa that not enough physical matter remained to justify sending the bones to a forensic anthropologist at Radford University, whom they planned to hire to study markers of age, race and gender. This would "likely add no new information to the record," Circa's report said.

"WAYNE, this is good!" Jones, the consultant, wrote to Carter, the county administrator. "It will be a huge money and time saver for us." (Jones took a job at Microsoft this year as an environmental permitting program manager, according to her LinkedIn profile.)

In an interview, May said he worried that in the rush to excavate Moseley Cemetery, the Circa team may have missed important artifacts and tombstone inscriptions. "I think posterity would hate to know that the people doing the work, including myself, didn't know what they were looking at," May said. "None of the crew knew anything about African-American burials."

Circa CEO Carol Tyrer wrote in response to questions that team members do have "knowledge of African-American cemeteries and burial customs." Tyrer referred other questions about the Moseley Cemetery dig to Microsoft.

In part because of ethical concerns, May left the field of commercial archaeology and history. "There is a disrespect in the process," May said recently. "People, their descendants, are not part of what we do."

Had the county or its consultants made more of an effort to determine who they were digging up, they might have learned from public death certificates and census records that one of the graves contained the remains of Ellen Walker and probably her husband James Walker, the parents of Lucy Walker, who married Stephen Moseley, a preacher's son from the same county. They could also find living relatives, such as Mary Taylor, now 83 years old, who is one of the many great-granddaughters of Stephen and Lucy Moseley. She lives in Norfolk and keeps a tattered folder full of records of one of her mother's brothers being buried in Moseley Cemetery. They may have come across records of other cousins, aunts and uncles by marriage who formed their own branches of the family tree, whose descendants still own other parcels of land in Mecklenburg County and who apparently were buried there, too.

In the final weeks of the dig, Microsoft got even more active, with a drone flying over Circa workers to monitor their progress. "There will be nowhere to take cover!" - wrote a Microsoft project manager in an email as crews prepared to cut down trees still ringing the cemetery.

Microsoft flew a drone over the grave dig site and photographed its location among the trees.

After the excavation was completed, the Army Corps informed Mecklenburg County that it had met its obligations under federal law. Construction crews leveled the ground at the cemetery site. Title to the land was transferred from the county to Microsoft.

In response to questions, Corps officials wrote that they consulted with the Department of Historic Resources and Mecklenburg County before issuing the permit. The spokesman also said the Corps posted the notice on its Web site about the same time the county published its notice in the Sun newspaper "soliciting comments on the project." No one responded.

Aerial photos of Mecklenburg County taken in the 1990s show rows of evergreen trees crisscrossing both old Moseley lots like the twists and arcs of a thumbprint. Then, in a 2016 satellite image of the area, the outline of the trees and their center point disappear. A series of rectangles - backfilled graves - appear on the sun-baked ground. By 2020, the aerial image shows only an undeveloped parcel of land on the far eastern edge of Microsoft's property, beyond the boundary of the land the Moseleys still own.

"Because the cemetery was moved from its original location," says the final archaeological report on file with the state archives, "it is no longer eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

Part of the Microsoft data center built on the site of Moseley Cemetery.

In 2019, four years after Moseley Cemetery was excavated, Mecklenburg County will begin construction of a badly needed new middle and high school. Surveyors found a cluster of headstones on the unexcavated land bearing the surname of Tunstall, a white family with a long history in the area. In order for construction to proceed as planned, the graves had to be relocated, and the school board published a notice in the newspaper similar to the one placed about the Moseley cemetery. But in this case, the relocation was also discussed at public meetings of the school board. The construction firm working on the project trumpeted its efforts to locate relatives.

A Mecklenburg County Sheriff's deputy named Dustin Lett saw the news about the cemetery on Facebook. She is a descendant of the Tunstalls.

"Because of our involvement, we can influence where they get moved," Lett said recently.

The county judge issued an order authorizing the school board to bury the remains. They were reburied in the family cemetery in several towns.

"Family members should be buried with family members," Lett says. "But we living people want to have one place where we can visit them, talk to them."

David and Mike Moseley don't think they would have been able to win a fight with Microsoft or the county to keep the cemetery in its original location, although they would like the opportunity to do so. They were also deprived of the ability to decide where their ancestors would be reburied.

"We'd like them to be moved here where the rest of the family is," David Moseley told me when we met at the Jerusalem Temple United Holiness Church cemetery, where the Moseleys have been burying their relatives since the 1960s, after they moved off the farm. David's sister Dorothy Tolbert, who died in New Jersey in May, is buried there, not far from Lucy Moseley's grave - a grave that was openly registered online three years before the Microsoft project. "It would be respectful, it would allow them to be together," David says. In 1967, when Lucy Moseley died at age 96, relatives decided it would be too expensive to move her husband's grave to the Jerusalem Temple cemetery. They decided to let their ancestors rest in peace.

At the very least, says David Moseley, Microsoft or the county could install a plaque or historical marker at the cemetery site that would list the names of everyone buried in the old cemetery.

Mike and David Moseley visit the cemetery where the family has chosen to bury many of its members in recent decades. According to them, if they had known that the old family cemetery was being moved, they would have asked that the remains be reburied in this church.

State and local officials are actively working to honor and preserve white cemeteries in Mecklenburg County. A 2003 book on the successful efforts to have several historic downtowns listed on the National Register of Historic Places described the view from White Cemetery as "bucolic." This view was protected by a historic preservation easement in the State of Virginia. The other cemetery, with only three stones visible, is characterized by impressive gate posts inscribed with the words "Love Makes a Memorial Forever," donated in 1941 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

In August, I met with David and Mike Moseley to look for the reburied graves of their relatives in a cemetery in Chase City, 15 minutes north of the Microsoft data center. The final report on the dig said a marker would be placed there "indicating the number of remains, the location from which they were removed, the date, and known surnames."

We drove slowly through the cemetery looking for a plaque. But we didn't find one. Over lunch at a local restaurant, we called the Chase City municipal office. The clerk told us that she thought she knew what it was all about: in the new section of the city cemetery, behind the mausoleum, we would find "graves that the county sent in."

"There are no names here. It just says 'collected bones,'" she said, reading from a document kept in the town office. She pointed us in the right direction, listing names on several other stones near the reburial sites.

As we drove past the mausoleum, we noticed a grave with one of those names on it and stopped the car. David looked out the window. "I know that stone," he said quietly. "It's been a long time since I've seen it."

Stephen Moseley's headstone was set in the ground. Six feet to the right stood the stone of his young son, Fred D. Moseley. There was nothing to indicate the existence of other remains, only an unmarked patch of grass.

David and Mike Moseley put their hands on top of Stephen's headstone. "I wouldn't have known where he was buried," Mike Moseley repeated, and then sat down in front of the stone with his hand on top and cried. Being here with them now, he said, "it ties us together."