Scan may reveal secrets in Schenectady's Vale Cemetery

PHOTOGRAPHER: Justin Mason

Vale Cemetery’s African American Ancestral Burial Ground holds the remains of many storied figures in Schenectady history.

Moses Viney, a runaway slave befriended and later freed by Union College President Eliphalet Nott, has a headstone at the plot, as do abolitionists John Wendell, Francis Dana and R.P.G. Wright. The site also contains the remains of Harrison Vrooman, a Harlem Hellfighter who served as courier to Gen. John Pershing during World War I.

But the ancestral burial ground likely contains the graves of many lesser-known people, some of whom may not even have a headstone to identify their final resting place. Headstones denote 81 graves in the plot, but only a fraction of them date back to when the former Colored Cemetery on Veeder Street was relocated to Vale.

City records detail the old burial ground’s move in 1861. Local attorney Alonzo Paige paid to have it relocated after sand mining started unearthing coffins.

Still unknown, however, is how many graves were moved and whether the headstones coincide with actual burial sites.

“You have a dearth — a real absence — of gravestones,” said Louise Basa of the Community Archaeology Program at Schenectady County Community College as she surveyed the site Wednesday.

Now a private, Colonie-based company is hoping to shed some light on what lies beneath the headstones by using cutting-edge technology to probe under the earth. Geologists with Underground Imaging Technologies spent Wednesday scanning the grounds with radar in order to better map the ancestral burial ground’s graves.

The company agreed to scan the grounds after a chance meeting between Vale Board of Trustees President Bernard McEvoy and Laura Clark, UIT’s director of business development, during the state Association of Cemeteries conference last fall. After some discussion, Clark offered her company’s services pro bono.

“I said ‘you’re the answer to our prayers,’ ” McEvoy recalled Wednesday.

UIT conducted a pair of scans over the grounds, both intended to map up to 10 feet beneath the surface. Geologist Max Grade likened one — called the single-coil time domain electromagnetic indicator — to a “souped-up metal detector.”

The machine looks a bit like a push mower and bounces a radar signal off the earth. Whenever the signal hits an anomaly, it registers as a hyperbola on an LCD screen and is recorded into a databank.

Underground anomalies can range from a tree root to elements of a grave. Decaying coffins change the consistency of the soil, which then reflects a different signal back to the machine.

Sharply peaked hyperbolas registering at shallow depths usually indicate something other than a grave. But gradual hyperbolas registering at depths below 5 feet in the earth are usually coffins.

“You can tell, to some degree, what it is by the dimensions of the response,” Grade said.

Of course, the scanners won’t reveal all of the plot’s secrets. Grade said detailed images of what lies beneath are an element of fiction popularized in network television shows like NCIS.

“That’s not reality though,” he said.

In actuality, the scans produce volumes of raw data, which can then be compared with Vale’s historical records. Grade said the process could take weeks, but should reveal how accurate the cemetery maps are and whether there are unmarked graves in the plot.

And for Basa, that information means a lot. Matching where the coffins are buried with existing maps could reveal a long-forgotten element of the ancestral plot’s legacy.

“For one thing, we don’t know how many gravestones there were, and sometimes they don’t necessarily match up,” she said.