TRANSFER STATION

O’Neal African Methodist Episcopal Church sits off Lower Woolsey Road in Hampton, Georgia. Freedmen founded it in the early Reconstruction years; the building itself may date somewhat later. No internal structures remain now, evidence of a fire, the front sealed behind cinderblock. The cemetery sits across the road.

You know what usually happens to places like this: they disappear before anyone outside finds out.

The signal

In mid-July 2026, the nonprofit Honor Thy Roots Cemetery Preservation, run by Efaye Lloyd and Shawndrea Gay, walked the wooded lot across from O’Neal AME and found dozens of graves, stones sunk at angles, some fallen and covered by debris. Fox 5 Atlanta and WSB-TV both covered it. The ground is no more protected now.

The oldest marked grave dates to 1871. Ceasar Fortson is buried there, born in 1830 and died in 1900; his stone reads “Gone, But Not Forgotten.” Emancipation reached Georgia in 1865, between those two dates. Thomas A. Fortson, a Walden University teacher, died in 1901 under a stone reading “He Was Charitable.” WSB-TV describes those buried at O’Neal as African Americans “born before, during and after the Civil War.” No source records the founding congregation’s own status, free or enslaved, and this essay will not supply one.

Immediately behind the cemetery, Georgia Power is building what the city calls a transfer station; the city manager gave reporters that term, not the company. It rises alongside Hampton Technology Park, a 603-acre, five-building, four-million-square-foot data center campus filed with the state as a Development of Regional Impact, buildout through 2033.

The mirror

In 2014, Microsoft went looking for land in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, for a $346 million data center expansion. Surveyors found a cemetery and read Stephen Moseley’s name off the largest stone; he died December 3, 1930. Archaeologists later found the site eligible for the National Register.

The public notice ran in the classifieds of a weekly paper; Moseley’s own great-grandson worked there as a staff writer and never saw it. Thirty-seven graves were dug up in spring 2015, remains described afterward as saturated and in poor condition. Descendants were never contacted. The remains were reburied in four plots one town to the north, five hundred dollars a plot. A marker had been promised; none was installed. What exists on file in the town office is a paper reading “assorted bones.”

Nobody has proposed digging up O’Neal. Moseley is what “handled” looks like once nobody outside is watching; Hampton is the beginning of that same sequence.

The pattern

What exists is what Honor Thy Roots found on foot: sunken earth, scattered stones, no boundary drawn. “There’s never been any type of survey on this land; no archeological data has been produced to show where the bodies are placed,” Lloyd told WSB-TV. To Fox 5: “The fact that the data center is so close to here, we don’t know if they are over burials or not.”

Hampton’s response, relayed through the city, is a fence, or rather a better one. Orange safety fencing already wraps three sides of the cemetery, separating it from the construction site; Georgia Power has offered to replace that with a more permanent barrier and a formal access point. City officials say they will work with the advocates despite the private land. What Lloyd and Gay have publicly asked for is a survey; whether they have also rejected the upgraded fence as insufficient isn’t something the reporting on record settles.

As of the most recent reporting, per Unheard Voices Magazine, the data center campus is still “already moving dirt.” Nobody has reported a pause.

The mechanism

A fence marks a boundary. A survey finds one.

A barrier only works if nobody names the difference: it assumes the edge is known. The people who found this place say nobody knows where it is. You cannot fence what you have not mapped; you can only fence what you’ve decided is close enough.

Hampton did not invent this alone. The city, population roughly 9,200, has three data center projects converging within a few years: Equinix, Henderson Farms, Hampton Technology Park.

The pattern holds past Hampton too. Georgia Power’s five-year plan adds more than a thousand miles of new transmission line across roughly 330 parcels statewide, some residential; the company acknowledges using eminent domain, sparingly by its own account. A cemetery boundary, unlike a parcel line, doesn’t show up on a deed. It only shows up if somebody looks for it before the equipment arrives.

Nobody has looked yet. The equipment has already arrived.

Update

Updated 2026-09-22. This file was reported on July 28, 2026. Two things have been said about O’Neal since then. They are recorded here, not settled.

The city now describes a buffer. On August 6, 2026, Fox 5 Atlanta reported that Hampton Mayor Anne Tarpley “confirmed a 50-foot buffer separates” the cemetery from the data center. On August 22, 2026, Cynthia L. Jennings walked the boundary lines for To Die For Images and described the cemetery as “completely fenced in, with an approximately 75-foot buffer.” Neither figure is a survey. On August 27, 2026, Lloyd told the Community Sentinel what she told WSB-TV in July: “There’s never been any type of survey on this land.”

Others now say what this file does not. Fox 5 reported on August 6 that “community advocates have documented 54 named individuals and 16 undocumented enslaved people buried at the site,” and the Community Sentinel attributes that count to Gay and Lloyd. On August 17, the Black Cemetery Network posted a site brief giving “Founded: 1810-1820” and describing the cemetery as representing “individuals and families who experienced enslavement before Emancipation.” The brief lists Honor Thy Roots among its affiliate groups and names no document for the founding date. This file has not found a record that settles either claim, so the sentence above stands. The claims are named here so a reader who meets them knows this file has read them.

Sources: Fox 5 Atlanta, August 6, 2026. To Die For Images, August 22, 2026. Black Cemetery Network site brief, August 17, 2026. Community Sentinel, August 27, 2026. Each read in full on September 22, 2026.