(Audio fixed)Juneteenth Special: Jaew Bee Episode 2
In which we walk to an unmarked gravesite for African American Vermonters
My fiancé Dan used to go car camping with his grandparents in upstate New York when he was young. He has fond memories of those expeditions and they were the impetus for us to start camping together in the late aughts.
That and his parents gave us their retired tent and sleeping bags. We’ve stuck to mostly Vermont State Parks for its variety and ease. For the past decade, during the third week of July, we host a group camp stay with friends, some of whom we only ever see during that week. Time in the woods has become an essential part of who we are.
In 2021, Dan and I booked a waterfront site at Lake Bomoseen State Park in Rutland County. It was a hot lazy weekend, the first in which Juneteenth was a federally recognized holiday (which Vermont had yet to do).
Every park has its own schedule of events. This weekend at Bomoseen there was a scheduled walk to a local African American cemetery. Naturally curious, Dan and I decided to give it a go.
Our guide was Christopher Bun, a young man who’d just started working for the parks. I strapped on my recording equipment, hoping he’d let me interview him for an occasional podcast I’d started.
The walk took us down Moscow Road, past structural remnants of the West Castleton Railroad and Slate Company, previously the Briggs farmstead. It was locally known that African Americans worked the farm and then with slate company. They lived and died close by. The park has a Slate History Trail that tells the story of these remains. We walk off the edge of the trail’s map.
A gated service road set far back enough that we almost missed it, led across a meadow and into a wooded area where we found a slate headstone of Ketura Briggs. It’s the only stone that was inscribed.
In the satellite image below, we would have entered the clearing from Moscow Road near the bottom of section. It was a short walk.
Google Maps Satellite view (43.660924, -73.230526) Castleton, VT
In the few years since I’ve recorded this jaunt, I’ve only found one article about Ketura Briggs, so I haven’t been able to corroborate any of Christopher’s statements. That’s the reason this recording took so long to bring about—I thought I needed to do the reporterly thing and look for more evidence.
But I had lost sight of the fact that the stories and memories we pass along —oral knowledge— is valid enough a story.
I think about this all the time, the refrain from a Hamilton song pulsing in the back of my brain: who lives, who dies, who tells your story?
It’s especially on my mind every Father’s Day and June 16, the anniversary of my father’s death (which this year occurred on the same day). I was tasked by the family to write the death notice for the local newspaper. That was eight years ago. I still haven’t gotten around to it. If his death is not published in a paper of record, could it ever have happened? Would it give greater context to his life? Or simply allow us to archive it and move on? Every year I play chicken with the courage to make our lives matter. If not to me, then to a future someone. Every year I lose.
Ketura Briggs, while not fully known, is not completely lost. Not today. Dan, Christopher, and myself go to find her.
Please note: this episode is freely accessible on my podcast Jaew Bee.
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If you’d like to support getting more Vermonters into our state parks, please donate to the Vermont Parks Forever’s Park Access Fund.
Your intrepid podcaster w her makeshift sling bag of recording equipment (yes that sling is one of Dan’s belts). Lake Bomoseen State Park, June 2021, photo by Dan Barlow. More of Dan’s photos after the paywall.
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This recording was made possible by: Anna Van Dine, Mark Johnson, Erica Heilman, Andy Kolovos, Dan Barlow, and Christopher Bun. 👋🏽
This is a new post to correct an earlier version that didn’t have a playable audio file. I may delete that one, IDK. For now, they are both up and they are both exactly the same.