Located across from the Abbott Monument in Fort Frederica National Park, you can visit the African American Burial Ground to learn more about the enslaved people on St. Simons Island and surrounding coastal areas.

The African American Burial Ground is a testament to the enslaved people that were brought to coastal Georgia from Central and West Africa. They brought their cultural customs, languages, and belief systems with them. Enslavement on isolated island and coastal plantations in the lower Atlantic coast created a unique culture with deep African retentions. Descendants of these enslaved people and their traditions are known as Gullah Geechee.

Following the Revolutionary War, fourteen plantations were established on St. Simons Island, including the land that is now Fort Frederica National Monument. Owners used enslaved people to work the land. Burial sites were typically located on land unsuitable for farming or other commercial pursuits. The burials at Fort Frederica were discovered in the summer of 2019. Research is ongoing to discover more details about the lives of the individuals found here.

No gravestones exist, however the use of seashells were used to mark the graves. Seashells while not unique to Gullah Geechee culture, has been described as a connection to the water that transported them and would hopefully take them back to Africa after death.

Jul 8, 2019, The Brunswick News: After several years of searching, Fort Frederica's Michael Seibert is confident that a recent archaeological excavation on the grounds has located the burial site of Thomas Abbott. He was the father or Robert S. Abbott, who went on to publish the Chicago Defender daily newspaper and become one of America's first black millionaires.

The wealthy newspaperman returned to St. Simons Island only once, in the 1930s, when he honored his father with the obelisk on or near where he was presumably buried. The granite monument also honors Robert S. Abbott's aunt, Celia Abbott.

eibert's research and field work places Thomas and Celia more precisely in a "colored burial lot," rudimentary records of which were uncovered in the archives of nearby Christ Church Frederica. Thomas and Celia were among 10 African Americans listed as being buried at the site, as identified by a hand-drawn map with identifying particulars written in cursive.

Proof of the grave sites came during a dig on the location, conducted by a team led by Seibert and Eric Bezemek of the National Park Service's Southeastern Archaeological Center in Tallahassee, Fla. In at least two locations the team uncovered evenly-spread layers of shell and rock fragments, pieces of colored glass from wine bottles, clear glass shards, ceramic fragments and broken marble.

Such simple adornments were commonly used in burials by members of the Gullah Geechee culture in the 19th century, when the resources for more permanent memorials for loved ones were not available to these freedmen and freedwomen.

Thomas Abbott is listed on the map as buried in a grave site designated "2" and Celia is listed in the plot marked "4." Others in the map's list include "child of Polly" and a man named Myles, with a barely legible surname that is possibly McMillan. A member of Christ Church had uncovered the map in the church archives.

The burial site was located using good old fashioned archaeological detective work. A big clue was a bend indicated on the map along one side of the burial lot's property line. On the other side of this line, "Wall of Frederica" is written in cursive. They then matched that bend in the line to the location of a triangular bastion that once jutted out from the walls of Fort Frederica, which was built beginning in 1736 to protect the new Colony of Georgia from invasion by the Spanish to the south in St. Augustine.

The walls of the fort have long since crumbled, but enough traces of it would have still been above ground to affect the cemetery's property line back in the mid- to late 19th century, archaeologists say. Fort Frederica ceased operations around the mid 18th century, and many landowners overlapped the property in the decades and centuries that followed, including parts of Christ Church as well as Capt. Stevens' Oatland Plantation. The grounds and some remnants of the fort were established as an official National Park Service site in 1947.

By then, the true resting places of Thomas Abbott and the others interred in the "colored burial lot" had long since been lost to time and attrition. The monument his grateful son established to Thomas Abbott remained standing when the land became part of the national monument site.