The Mayo Family lived in Earlysville Virginia (near the modern-day airport off Route 29). They farmed and operated several businesses, most likely passed down from father to son. This cemetery contains the marked graves of the Mayo Family (their son's gravestone is illustrated at theleft, with the optimistic hand pointing to heaven). The cemetery is included here because oral history reveals that their slaves were buried in or adjacent to this cemetery. Unfortunately, the cemetery was partially bisected by a 20th Century road that leads to a modern housing development. Many of the stones are in disarray and the iron fence that once surrounded the burial ground is scattered in pieces (see the photo below for an overview of the cemetery as it appears today). Thus it is difficult to locate the inscribed stones, let alone any unmarked graves. This type of African American cemetery is common, but very difficult to locate because of the small number of burials and the lack of any historic or geographic record of its location. In this case, concerned house owners brought the cemetery to our attention.

Because of the difficulties mentioned above, it is impossible to say exactly how many individuals are buried in this cemetery. Additional historic research will give us a sense of how large the enslaved population was at the farm (most likely under a dozen individuals at any given time). But we may never know which (if any) of these individuals were buried in this location.