This stone revives a flooded and forgotten N.B. Black graveyard

A new memorial stone sits at the top of a small cemetery along the St. John River in New Brunswick. The grey stone is about seven feet tall and has dozens of names etched into it. Names that, until now, had long been forgotten. 

 N.B. Power paid for the stone and placed it there in the fall of 2021. It replaces an older memorial that still stands at the graveyard, but that stone didn't tell the story of what happened here.

"The previous stone that was placed in '68 didn't even have a date on it. So we made sure that it states that," said Mary Louise McCarthy Brandt. 

McCarthy Brandt has worked hard to bring back to life the memory of the Kingsclear Kilburn Community Cemetery, where her ancestors should be buried but aren't. It is their names that are finally written in the stone here.

A new documentary, called Written in Stone, about the graveyard's history will be broadcast on CBC Radio on Sunday at 8:30 a.m.

The Kingsclear Kilburn Community Cemetery was originally about half a kilometre upriver from where it is now.

It was segregated — white people were buried on higher ground, and Black people were buried closer to the river, below the train tracks that ran through the area.

The lower side, the Black side, was called the Kingsclear (Early Black) Cemetery.

In the 1960s, when N.B. Power was planning to build the Mactaquac Dam across the St. John River, nearly everything had to be moved to allow the water to be raised. Houses, churches, whole communities, and of course cemeteries would be flooded out. 

Some buildings were moved, some were burned. Many graves were reinterred, while some were left behind. 

Records from the provincial archives show a list of cemeteries in the area that were moved as part of the "cemetery relocation project."

Of the cemeteries listed in the relocation project, all are marked as "completed" except the Kingsclear (Early Black) Cemetery.

The instructions for that one are: "Not to be Moved or Disturbed." The graves were left, and swallowed by the dam's floodwaters.

The plan was for Black people to be buried off to the side, closer to the trees, and that's where the stone was placed in 1968. There's no record of anyone having been buried there.