Lebanon Presbyterian Church has two cemeteries. The Main Cemetery is located just behind the church’s buildings. A listing of its graves is found here. The cemetery has approximately 500 persons interred in it.
Burials span from the mid-1820s to the present. A number of veterans are buried in our cemetery, to include a veteran of the Revolution, twenty-three Confederate veterans, and veterans of the Spanish-American War, World Wars I & II, Korea, and Vietnam. The graves of these veterans are decorated with flags each year.
Space in the cemetery is available gratis for the church’s active members and their immediate household. Spaces are also available on a limited basis for purchase, but may not be resold. The church provides mowing and weed-eating around the graves, but families are responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of the actual graves and headstones. See the Church’s Cemetery Policies here.
In the woods behind the main cemetery is an Enslaved Persons Burial Site. It is accessible only by permission of the church due to safety considerations. The site is characterized by numerous depressions and by simple field stone markers on approximately 25% of the graves. It is estimated that 150-200 persons rest here who were kept as slaves on properties in the vicinity of Lebanon Presbyterian Church. No records have been kept as to those interred there. It is estimated that burials began around the time of the church’s establishment, running up to the 1870s, when African-American congregations began to form in our area.
As was the practice of Presbyterian churches in the first several decades of our congregation’s existence, persons of color who were enslaved would be admitted to communing membership upon their profession of faith and examination by the Session of the church. It is reasonable to believe that a number of those buried at this site were members of Lebanon, and our spiritual mothers and fathers in the faith.
The site is registered with the SC Institute for Archeology and Anthropology.