On a hill overlooking Sweet Briar College’s two lakes, moss-covered fieldstones lay seemingly at random, encircled by a grove of Ailanthus altissima, commonly called the tree of heaven or paradise tree.

Much like their placement, the size and shape of the rocks are not uniform, and here and there, if you look closely — if you crouch down and scan the shady expanse like a detective looking for clues — there are subtle depressions in the earth.

At one corner of the roughly acre-sized plot, a plaque reads, “Sacred resting place of unknown founders who labored to build what has become Sweet Briar College. We are in their debt.”

According to Lynn Rainville, founding director of Sweet Briar’s Tusculum Institute and a researcher of African-American mortuary traditions, this is the final resting place of the lesser-known founders of Sweet Briar College — slaves owned by Elijah Fletcher, father of College founder Indiana Fletcher Williams.

Last weekend, Aug. 1 through 3, descendants of Fletcher’s slaves — who took the Fletcher surname — held their biennial family reunion at Sweet Briar for the first time. While here, they walked in the footprints of their ancestors, touring the plantation burial ground, Sweet Briar House and a slave cabin located on campus.

“This is one of the amazing things about Sweet Briar,” Rainville said. “Not only have we been conducting this research about African-American history, we can offer a tour of the place itself. … People walking the trails of today are walking the landscape of slavery. It’s both a powerful teaching tool and a powerful moment of place in history.”

About 150 people attended the reunion, which was based at the Florence Elston Inn & Conference Center. In addition to the tours, catching up with relatives and a Saturday night dance, the weekend also included talks by Rainville, Sweet Briar President Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, vice president of development Heidi McCrory and Fletcher family member Annette Anderson.

Muhlenfeld called the reunion a “wonderful, cyclical kind of coming home in a spiritual kind of way.” She also talked about the history of Sweet Briar College and how, during the Civil Rights era, the school had challenged Indiana Fletcher’s will – ultimately taking the case to the U.S. Supreme Court – so that African-American girls could attend the College.

In a talk reminiscent of a church revival, Anderson, an elementary school principal from Pennsylvania, challenged her family to make sure its history is preserved. She told the story of a father and son. The son, she said, had never been off the farm and the father told him to walk into town “to see what he could see.”

The boy said he was afraid, that he couldn’t go, but the father insisted that he walk to a tree in the distance. Once there, he would see what lay ahead of him. Like the boy, Anderson said, “we are at a pivotal place in our family history.”

Anderson, who compared what her family was doing to what Sally Hemmings’ descendants did at Monticello, added that the “journey is probably going to be a little uncomfortable for us. … Walk to the tree, hold hands together and see what there is to see for us.”

During her talk, Rainville revealed a genealogical link she discovered between Fletcher’s slaves and the modern-day, African-American Fletcher family. Previously, the family could trace its lineage only back to Patrick Henry Fletcher and Jennie Louis Carter Fletcher, both born after Emancipation.

Using census records, gravestone data, marriage records, Elijah Fletcher’s will and other papers at Sweet Briar, Rainville discovered that Patrick Henry’s parents were James and Lavinia Fletcher, who were married in 1855. When she revealed the names, there was a collective gasp and applause filled the room.

“Just to know the names of people [in the family] who were actually slaves,” reunion coordinator Bethany Pace said. “It’s just a part of American history. Many African-American families, that’s a part of it.

“You know you’re descended from slavery, but you don’t know how many generations back it was or what their names were. I’ve always felt indebted to those ancestors. … [It is] because of their work and their strength that our family still exists.”

As a child growing up in the Cleveland suburbs, Pace heard stories about her family and its connection to Sweet Briar College. The word “slavery” was never used, she said, only that her ancestors “worked at Sweet Briar.”

“It really came from kind of family folklore,” Pace, now a higher education professional for Harford Community College in Bel Air, Md., said. “I had always heard that the family had this relationship with Sweet Briar, but no one ever really knew any details about it. I was always curious and thought, ‘You know, I just want to find out.’ ”

Pace’s research led her to Rainville’s Web site, which includes information about Sweet Briar’s African-American history. Pace sent her an e-mail, and in October of 2007, she visited the campus and met with Rainville and Muhlenfeld about having her family reunion at Sweet Briar.

When asked if there was resistance from her family to gathering at Sweet Briar, a place that could have held negative connotations, Pace said there wasn’t. “If [there was], it was really underground,” she said. “But I was so excited about it and especially after I visited in October. …

“I just thought, ‘This is amazing,’ because I think everyone really views it as a gift because there are all types of families of different racial and ethnic backgrounds that have not been able to trace back to the mid-nineteenth century of their family. I think people were really excited about that discovery.”

After the reunion, Pace hopes her relatives will take two things back home with them: a certainty about their family history and a desire to preserve that history at Sweet Briar through philanthropy.

“I think there’s a lot to be proud of in that the labor of our ancestors, when it was a plantation, generated the revenue that has allowed for this wonderful college, educating women, to thrive,” she said. “I think that’s very exciting, something I would like our family to support.”

During the group’s visit to the plantation burial ground on Saturday, Tracey Carter, who came to the reunion from Washington, D.C., held an impromptu libation. Libation, she explained, is a ritual prayer in African-American churches, where water is poured from a pitcher into a bowl and you call out the names of your ancestors.

“It’s the perfect place for a prayer of libation. … We’re on the gravesite of our ancestors,” she said.

Carter gathered her relatives at one corner of the graveyard and led by Eddie Fletcher, a family patriarch who lives on Amherst County land that has been in the Fletcher family since Emancipation, the libation was performed.

As Eddie Fletcher thanked God for “this gathering” and the cemetery, calling it a “place where we all can be joyful,” water was poured from plastic cups and bottles, originally brought to the cemetery to fend off the 90-degree temperatures.

“We do not come here to hate, but to love,” he said, his voice rising like a preacher’s, and he talked about the “final family reunion” in Heaven. When he finished the prayer, the Fletchers called out the names of their ancestors — “Alice, Gladys, Jennie Louis, Robert …” — as the water sprinkled the dry earth.

— By Suzanne Ramsey, SBC staff writer