Saint Michael African-American Cemetery in Columbia, South Carolina

About

Get directions Windward Point Road at Arwen Lane
Columbia, South Carolina 29212 United States

Coordinates: 34.06572, -81.23832
Cemetery ID:

Members have Contributed

About these numbers These percentages indicate the number of Find a Grave memorials that have a grave photo or GPS coordinates. We don't know the total number of burials in a cemetery, so we cannot calculate a percentage of those with memorials, photos or GPS coordinates.

Photos

This cemetery is very close to Saint Michael Lutheran Church on River Road in Columbia, SC. It has long been known that there were African-American members of the congregation starting in 1814. John Dreher, Founding Elder of the congregation petitioned the North Carolina Synod of the Lutheran Church (the ecclesiastical jurisdiction holder at the time) for permission to include the enslaved community in the worshiping congregation in 1816. One of the eight legible grave-markers belongs to July Spence, a Founding Trustee of Pleasant Spring AME Church nearby, which was assisted in its founding by members of Saint Michael in 1873. There is no record of Mr. Spence in the community prior to Emancipation and it is likely that he was a life-long resident of this community.