Radar Pinpoints Long-Unmarked
Resting Places in Watkinsville Cemetery

Jeff DeHart sprayed paint on the grassy field, making rough rectangles where he believes the bones of some long-ago Watkinsville residents are buried without the benefit of a headstone.

DeHart, the regional manager for Ground Penetrating Radar Systems Inc., visited Watkinsville this week to map out about 65 graves in an unmarked part of the city's cemetery on Simonton Bridge Road.

"This small of an area, it's surprising that there's this many unmarked (graves)," DeHart said. "It's not unheard of, but that's a relatively high number."

The Daughters of the American Revolution hired DeHart to peer into the ground and read the dim past as part of its effort to get the 200-year-old cemetery listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The group must have the graveyard surveyed and plots outlined before the cemetery is considered for the national register.

The DAR started the process by hiring DeHart with a $2,500 grant from the Watson-Brown Foundation's Junior Board, a group that focuses on historic preservation in Georgia and South Carolina.

To help decipher who's buried where, DeHart pushed his baby buggy-sized radar unit back and forth across the field, watching a screen that displayed what the invisible rays were "seeing" underground.

Ground-penetrating radar beams electromagnetic waves into the soil that bounce back to a detector, enabling DeHart to see on the display screen the disturbances in the soil - a process similar to how a bat or a dolphin uses sound waves to "see" in the dark or underwater, he said.

"It shows me where changes are in the dirt," he said.

DeHart worked his way across the cemetery in sweeps, marking disturbances underground with each pass.

"I mark the boundaries of that change," he said. "In a lot of cases we can assume it's a grave."

A Methodist church originally owned the cemetery property in the early 1800s, but the church burned down in the 1820s and never was rebuilt. The city now owns parts of the cemetery, although abutting property owners have disagreed about the 6-acre graveyard's boundaries.

The earliest grave there is dated 1811, but the plot of land likely housed remains before that date, said Laurie Traill, a DAR member.

"The need now is just to protect this," Traill said.

DeHart plans to return next week to make a better survey of the road through the cemetery, he said.

"I did not have a chance to survey much of the road," he said.

Traill expects DeHart to find graves under the road because it's much newer than the cemetery but she doesn't think the road will be re-routed.

It would be nearly impossible to identify who's buried in the paved-over graves, and it would cost the city a lot of money to move the road, Traill said.

Still, her research will help descendants of Oconee County residents locate the graves of their relatives, said Mayor Joe Walter.

"The more information you have, the more you are able to help them," he said.

The DAR can cordon off the area now that members know better where the unmarked graves are, Traill said.

"Now we can protect it a little bit better," she said.