AMERICUS —
Tuesday, Len Strozier, owner of Omega Mapping Services in Woodbury, said that thought that he found a mass grave site in Eastview Cemetery with a ground penetrating radar. As part of the City of Americus’ Eastview Cemetery Beautification Project, Strozier was hired to find and map unmarked graves.
Tuesday, Strozier said that he believed he has found a 25 feet by 35 feet rectangular shaped mass grave in Eastview Cemetery. Strozier said that he could not say how many individuals may have been buried there or for what reason. Strozier said that he was notified by Mandy Young, Americus’ community and economic development director of a small pox epidemic that could have led to the mass grave site. In the 1850s in Oglethorpe, then Georgia’s capital city, a small pox epidemic was responsible for wiping out most of the city’s population.
Strozier said there were close to 500 orange flags so far Tuesday in the 5.1 acre Cemetery that indicated unmarked graves.
“Every flag is a burial,” said Strozier. He said that sonogram technology provides high confidence readings, meaning he is 85 percent sure every flag indicates a burial. On Strozier’s wheeled radar, he has a digital screen that produces a hyperbolic shape where objects are located underground. Strozier is able to distinguish burial sites from other underground objects by the size of the hyperbolic shape on the display and the depth at which the shape is indicated to be.
Strozier said that the burial sites would not contain human remains or even coffins but only air pockets where they once would have been. According to Strozier the acidity of the soil and warm climate are factors that would contribute to the total decomposition of the body, clothes and coffin.
“As far as the age of this cemetery, it is not untypical,” says Strozier in regard to the number of unmarked graves that he has located.
Local News
Related Photos
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Lee Strozier uses his “sonogram on wheels” to find unmarked graves in Eastview Cemetery. Each orange flag represents a grave he’s found that will be permanently be marked soon. Keven Gilbert
April 7, 2010
1 mass grave found at Cemetery — so far
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