Tantrum Theater, Ohio University’s professional theater company, and Invisible Ground, a local media arts organization, partnered to present a tour, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., of the West State Street Cemetery Friday. The event features members from the Athens Middle School Andrew Jackson Davidson Club.
Brian Koscho, the director and producer of Invisible Ground, originally came up with the idea of doing the tour through his own interest in the history of the West State Street Cemetery.
“In 2006, in the summer, I worked (at the cemetery) as a seasonal worker,” Koscho said. “When I was (there) a lot, I started reading things … besides being very old, it has a lot of information that’s visible … It’s a very interesting place in which you can walk by things and find out about them.”
Koscho’s organization created a podcast focused on local history, including the West State Street Cemetery, and a series of immersive historical markers that use an app in which people can overlay historical images into their reality.
The ADJC began research for the cemetery tour at the end of last school year.
Annabelle, an Athens Middle School student involved in the club, described the amount of research that has gone into creating the tour.
“We’ve taken like 10 tours of the West State Street Cemetery,” she said. “We went to the Athens archives in Alden Library … We spent a lot of weeks researching and documenting stuff.”
The students plan to collaborate with Invisible Ground to create a virtual cemetery tour. Other contributors include the Southeast Ohio History Center, Mount Zion Black Cultural Center, Appalachian Understories, the City of Athens and the Ohio Arts Council, according to an Ohio News article.
Highlights of the tour will include Andrew Jackson Davidson’s grave, the club’s namesake, and his wife’s grave, Eliza Brown Davidson.
The students will also present the history and reasoning behind the approximately 1,000 unmarked graves in the back of the cemetery, and the angel, which represents those with unmarked graves.
They will also tell the stories of many other graves, including murderers, Revolutionary and Civil War veterans and key members of Athens’ Black history and OU history.
“One of the things I love is history when it still is present,” Koscho said. “People cut through (the cemetery) to walk to class … It’s two blocks from Uptown. It’s in the middle of a neighborhood … it's three blocks from OU … I think there are real, tangible, exciting stories that lead to a lot of other ones.”
The ADJC, named after the first Black lawyer in Athens, was founded during the 2019-2020 school year as a way to challenge a select group of students. The club has expanded to include two more chapters – one at Plains Intermediate School and the other at Athens High School.
Angela Hall, the advisor of AJDC, described the club as a history club focused on the untold stories of Athens.
Along with the upcoming cemetery tour, the club has embarked on other projects such as cleaning the angel that can be seen at the gate of the cemetery and putting on an annual Black History Month event, originally created to unveil a portrait of Andrew Jackson Davidson.
The Black History Month event has now become a community tradition and will be celebrating its sixth year this February.
An online self-guided tour will also be available, along with a printed pamphlet for visitors, according to an Ohio News article. The event is free to the public, but guests are encouraged to register at this link.
