Genealogy society finds remnants of cemetery
Hardy began to suspect the Poor Home must have had cemetery grounds - one for black residents, another for white - after she began transcribing the facility's records in 2004, which she found in the South Carolina Archives.
With the assistance of Pope Cook, whose father was the Poor Home's last superintendent and who spent time there as a child, Hardy and the society members have located a few timeworn scraps of the Poor Home's cemetery for white residents in a wooded area behind the Aiken SPCA, the Aiken County Animal Shelter and the Doris Gravat Detention Center on Wire Road. The find includes one intact headstone, a wrought-iron floral bouquet holder, a wooden plaque worn smooth and free of carvings by time and weather, a glass ornament they believe to be part of a grave marker, a few more unreadable stones and depressions in the ground that may be indicative of burial sites.
"These records are not online; you have to go to the original documents, and they're not complete. I've heard that in the Depression they used some (records) as fuel for heating fires," Hardy said. "The number of deaths in the records led me to believe there had to be several graves in the area; many of the death certificates listed the Poor Home as the place of burial. We always knew it must be near the detention center, but that was as close as we could get."