Frankfort Heritage Lecture Series: Frankfort's Forgotten Cemetery

This presentation focuses on an early to mid-nineteenth century cemetery located in downtown Frankfort. It was used by the city’s enslaved and working class people of African, European, and mixed heritage prior to the Civil War. Upon the establishment of the Frankfort Cemetery on the bluffs overlooking the city in 1844, this earlier cemetery fell into disrepair.  In time, buildings and parking lots covered it; and for all intents and purposes, it was lost to history. When construction of a new state office building began, the cemetery was rediscovered. This presentation will provide an overview of the work carried out by archaeologists to locate the graves and remove the human remains prior to building construction. It also will discuss what was learned from the study of the human remains, the associated material culture items – like coffin hardware and objects buried with the deceased - and the spatial distribution of the graves within the cemetery. Dr. Pollack's book, Frankfort’s Forgotten Cemetery (2009), will be available for purchase.

Dr. David Pollack received his B.A. in Anthropology from Beloit College in 1977, his M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Kentucky in 1982, and his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Kentucky in 1998. He worked for the Kentucky Heritage Council from 1982 until 2008 as a Staff Archaeologist and the Site Protection Program Manager.  Since 1996, he has been the Director of the Kentucky Archaeological Survey, a program of Western Kentucky University's Department of Society, Culture, Crime & Justice Studies.  He has over forty years of experience in Kentucky archaeology and has conducted archaeological research at sites throughout the Commonwealth. He has published extensively on Kentucky archaeology, with an emphasis on indigenous village farmers.