New research from an environmental advocacy group seeking to identify some of those buried at the site of a proposed plastics plant along the Mississippi River in St. James Parish points to five enslaved people, ages 9 to 31, from the former Buena Visa plantation.
The findings by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade may have implications for an ongoing legal battle against Taiwanese conglomerate Formosa Plastics, which is seeking to build one of the largest plastics complexes in the world at the site, called the Sunshine Project, valued at $9.4 billion and encompassing 14 petrochemical plants.
"This is a tiny tip of an iceberg -- so many more names to be discovered," Lenora Gobert, a staff genealogist for the Bucket Brigade, said at the unveiling of the report at the André Cailloux Center in New Orleans on Monday.
Janile Parks, the director of community and government relations for the Sunshine Project, said that it has protected the only remains found on its property at the Buena Vista site, which were discovered by archaeologists for the company in 2019.
"I can assure you that we will continue to cooperate with the appropriate authorities, follow the law, and respectfully protect the remains on our property," Parks said, noting that the company is exploring long-term options with state authorities to respectfully protect the remains.
Garry Winchester, 71, a retired Navy database employee from New Orleans, speaks during at Juneteenth celebration Friday, June 19, 2020, at the site of a cemetery at the former Buena Vista Plantation property where Formosa Plastics plans to build a major
The new report builds on previous findings of human remains, but the Bucket Brigade said the study is the first to document some of the names and identities. Some previous research has been inconclusive on whether slaves were buried at that particular location, but activists have pointed to a series of converging factors to make their case.
'How is this even possible?'
Gobert, who began conducting the research in 2020, looked at conveyance and mortgage records by plantation owner Benjamin Winchester and his wife Carmelite Constant from around 1820 and 1860. One conveyance record -- a document on the transfer of property -- indicated the names of five people owned by Winchester marked as "dead" in the record. Their names were Stanley, 31, Harry, 18, Simon, who, 23, Betsy, 18, and Rachel, 9.
"They would have been buried at the Buena Vista burial site," the report states.
Ibrahima Seck, the director of research at the Whitney Plantation and a historian at University Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal, said that every plantation the size of Winchester's would have its own burial ground, usually on the site's margins. He said that the methodology of the Bucket Brigade's report appears sound.
When Gobert began her research, she knew that plantation owners mortgaged enslaved people in addition to their land and property.
"Mortgaging the enslaved was a system of pledging bodies to raise capital from banks, other financial institutions and individuals based on their appraised value," the report says.
But what stunned Gobert was that people identified as dead in the records continued to be mortgaged.
"It shocked me," she said. "And so the question that came to mind for me is, 'How is this even possible?' Mortgaging a person is a terrible thing -- how do these financial institutions set up a system whereby they agree it was fine to mortgage a dead person?"
Lenora Gobert, staff genealogist for the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, speaks with Inclusive Louisiana co-founders Barbara Washington and Gail LeBoeuf at the André Cailloux Center on October 21, 2024. Gobert authored a report finding the names of five enslaved people buried at the site of the proposed Formosa Plastics plant in St. James Parish.
Gobert said she has not found many answers to these historical questions, but pointed to scholarship indicating enslaved people were valued not only for what they produced through physical labor, but also through their speculative value determined by insurers and creditors. This practice led to a point "where some slave bodies were worth more dead than alive," according to one scholar.
All those identified in the report were mortgaged after their deaths, the Bucket Brigade found. Simon, who died at 23, was named as one of the dozens of enslaved people for an appraisement of the plantation. Though Simon had reportedly died early that year in 1832, the appraisers determined the plantation and its people to be worth the equivalent of over $2.5 million by current standards.
Rachel, too, was mortgaged three times during her short life and at least twice after her death, Gobert's research says. Her existence on the plantation had already been documented, the Bucket Brigade said, but the four decades of records that Gobert analyzed allowed her to track individuals from the early 19th century to the dawn of the Civil War and uncover new information about the lives of her family after slavery.
'Not be disturbed'
In 2019, a public records request by opponents of the Formosa plant found that the company's archaeologists had uncovered evidence of burial sites at the former Buena Vista plantation. Checking for remains is a mandatory step in securing federal permits.
Other archaeological and historical research has documented the existence of burial sites and remains across the larger industrial corridor, dubbed "Cancer Alley" by advocates.
The company said that it has respected and protected the remains discovered on its property. When the company learned of the remains at the site, Parks said, it "immediately coordinated with the appropriate authorities," the State Historic Preservation Office and Army Corps of Engineers' archaeologists.
The company then fenced in the burial site and protected the area within the boundary of its property "to ensure it would not be disturbed," according to Parks.
But the Bucket Brigade also says it obtained a 2019 report by Formosa's archaeological contractor that detailed plans to remove the remains.
"Once the burials have been adequately recorded, the human remains will be removed and placed into temporary containers (body bags) and prepared for reinternment," the report stated.
It was not clear if that plan would ultimately be followed by the company. The company stressed that it has consistently communicated with the local community on the burial sites. Parks said it is "exploring long-term options in coordination with state authorities to respectfully protect the remains."
"A path forward is under consideration and has not yet been determined as the company’s current focus is on active litigation brought by environmental activists against The Sunshine Project," she said.
Many activists want to commemorate the dead where they were laid to rest. Gail LeBouef, a lifelong St. James resident and the co-founder of Inclusive Louisiana, wants to see headstones on the former Buena Vista plantation.
The findings of Gobert's report didn't surprise her. LeBeouf already knew that enslaved people -- and even their descendants -- were buried on the plantations where they lived and labored, as her own grandmother was buried on a plantation by her great-grandmother.
"We the descendants of slaves have to make sure that we make it matter," she said. "Not just because we want the world to know, but inasmuch as we want our children and grandchildren to understand from where they came."