Shady Grove Cemetery placed on National Register of Historic Places

A local cemetery that provides "a tangible link to the history of Cape Girardeau County's rural Black citizens," has been placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Shady Grove Cemetery near Dutchtown, south of the City of Cape Girardeau, was placed on the National Register in June. Historian Robert Blythe was responsible for putting together the nomination for the site.

The nomination process took the historian a year. Blythe said he was approached in June 2021 by Judy Humphrey — a descendant of Washington Giboney, who served in the Civil War and is buried in Shady Grove — asking whether he would create a nomination. Humphrey, and other descendants, have been working on protecting the site for around a decade. Humphrey had even approached a group of Southeast Missouri State University students to write a nomination, but it was deficient, Blythe said.

"I was just happy to do my bit," he said.

The register created by the Preservation Act of 1966 is a program designed to support and organize efforts to protect significant resources to better understand and appreciate American history. In order for a site to be placed on the register, it must go through a formal nomination process and be approved by a State Historic Preservation Office and reviewed by an independent board of professors and historians.

Shady Grove's listing on the register will allow it to be added to the register website and makes it eligible for possible preservation grants in the future.

According to the registration form, the cemetery was likely established just after the Civil War by the rural Black community. The cemetery was maintained by newly freed slaves who went on to set up a community in the area that has since been lost.

"The Shady Grove Cemetery represents the determination of newly freed African Americans to establish a place of their own and control the rituals surrounding death," the form states.

At the time, cemeteries in the City of Cape Girardeau were still segregated, Blythe said. It was important for the Black communities with cemeteries, because it allowed them to honor their dead free from the second-class status of segregated cemeteries in the Jim Crow South, Blythe said.

From the 1890s — when the cemetery was officially deeded — to the 1960s, the cemetery served as the internment place for 182 people, although burials stagnated after the 1940s, according to records.

The cemetery is the last remaining physical evidence of the community, Blythe said in the form. The homes community members lived in and even the segregated school that was either located on or just south of cemetery grounds have been demolished.

Abandonment issues have resulted in preservation deficiencies in the cemetery. Vandalism has caused some grave markers to be missing and others to be inaccurate. However, Blythe said that doesn't diminish the site's importance and the need for it to be placed on the register.

"Walking among the remaining headstones in this wooded, rural setting provides compelling testimony of the lives of the African Americans who buried their dead here and gathered to honor them year after year," the form said.