230 Dead Black Boys. A ‘Secret Cemetery.’ Officials Knew, and Didn’t Act.

The Washington Post

12:24 JST, September 24, 2025

The founder of Maryland’s legislative Black Caucus heard whispers of a “secret cemetery” holding children’s graves, so in 1972 he walked into the woods to see for himself.

Among weeds and crawling vines, then-state delegate Troy Brailey found cracked gravestones marking the burial plots of Black boys who died during the late 19th and early 20th centuries at a state juvenile detention facility with a documented history of abuse and neglect. It was called the House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children.

Brailey, a prominent civil rights leader who has since died, called the site located 22 miles southeast of Washington, D.C., in Prince George’s County “disgraceful” in an Afro-American newspaper article about his visit. State officials later launched an inquiry.

Their conclusion: The boys had died of “consumption,” an old word for tuberculosis. Their count: 67 deaths.

More than 50 years later, a Washington Post investigation has found that state officials had grossly undercounted and that the number of children who died while in the care of the House of Reformation is at least 230. While many of the boys’ death certificates listed disease as their cause of death, news reports from the time call into question those determinations.

In the decades after Brailey’s visit, The Post found, the state noted the existence of the House of Reformation graveyard in maps, surveys and other government documents, one of which featured a photograph of headstones and about 100 graves marked only by cinder blocks. Yet it took no action to restore the site.

Instead, state leaders authorized another cemetery, this one for veterans, just yards away from the boys’ burial site.

While the veterans cemetery has been meticulously maintained, the House of Reformation graveyard is more dilapidated than ever, the stories of many of the boys buried there lost to time.

A fledgling effort to acknowledge the burial site is underway. Maryland’s Department of Juvenile Services has applied for a $31,000 grant to explore a potential restoration project. In response to a Post inquiry, a spokesperson for Gov. Wes Moore (D) said in a statement that “we anticipate additional investments in the restoration and repair of the cemetery” in next year’s state budget.

Former DJS secretary Vincent Schiraldi, whose team launched the restoration effort before he left the administration earlier this year, said the state’s decades of neglect amount to a “deep level of depersonalization and dehumanization.”

“The history of institutionalization is to rob people of their personhood, and I cannot think of a better example of it than taking children, some of whom hadn’t even committed a crime, some of whom were 10 years old, having them die in custody and burying them in a potter’s field, and not acknowledging it,” Schiraldi said. “That is not just robbing them of their personhood while they were in our care and custody, but even after death.”

Under the guise of providing structure and educational opportunity, House of Reformation officials forced the children to sow crops and cane chairs while leasing others to local farmers, according to state documents. The most common reasons for detention were “incorrigibility,” “stealing” and “vagrancy,” records show, and the teens and boys were malnourished and faced unsanitary conditions.

The Post visited the graveyard multiple times, read hundreds of pages of records from the state archives in Annapolis and analyzed death certificates to determine the number of children who died in state custody at the facility. At least 108 deaths are documented in annual reports from the House of Reformation to the governor’s office between 1873 and 1897. Death records account for another 122 children who died between 1898, when Prince George’s County began recording death certificates, and 1939, when the last known burial took place.

But even The Post’s death tally, the most comprehensive public accounting to date, is likely an undercount of how many children died there because key records are missing for many of the years analyzed.

Without further forensic and anthropological work at the site, it’s impossible to determine exactly how many children are buried in the House of Reformation graveyard.

After learning of the graveyard’s existence from a Washington Post article this summer, a cohort within Maryland’s legislative Black Caucus – the one founded by Brailey, which is now one of the largest in the country – started discussing how to keep the effort alive.

Del. Jeffrie E. Long Jr. (D), who represents the area of Prince George’s County where the boys are buried, said he hopes to propose a bill in the upcoming legislative session that would set up a commission to investigate the deaths and restore the burial grounds. He refuses to call the boys’ graveyard a “cemetery” until it is maintained like one.

“The state needs to put its money where its mouth is,” Long said, adding that the process must include input from Prince George’s County residents who are overwhelmingly Black and could be related to those buried at the site.

There’s more to learn about the graveyard, Long said, including how many bodies are there and why.

“Who knows,” he said, “how much could still be lying beneath the surface.”

‘Maryland’s Hell Hole’

The first Black boys arrived at the House of Reformation in 1873, sent there primarily by judges to learn order under the supervision of a former Civil War general. Once there, the children and teenagers were assigned inmate numbers.

The General Assembly had established the privately run institution as an alternative to sending those kids to adult prison, 15 years after the state opened a similar facility for White children called the House of Refuge.

By the House of Reformation’s third year, three boys had died in a tuberculosis outbreak, records show. But the earliest names The Post could find were from the 1877 annual report, when six more boys died: James Black, William Brown, James Dixson, John Robertson, George Williams and Matthew Bloe.

Their ages were not given. Their reported causes of death ranged from “lockjaw” to scarlet fever. Illnesses like pneumonia and typhoid fever appear frequently in the records of dozens of boys who died at the facility.

But child welfare advocates would eventually question the integrity of the institution’s cause of death determinations, including Bloe, who House of Reformation officials said died of “spinal meningitis.”

Just before he died, a sickly Bloe told a cook and a steward at the hospital that his teacher had struck him in the back with a hatchet, according to a Baltimore Sun story at the time. The teacher admitted to “playing” with the boy and was fired from the facility. But no coroner examined Bloe’s body before it was buried, according to the Sun, and a postmortem report said no injuries were found.

Charles Salisbury, 16, and John Hall, 17, suffered from severe frostbite in their feet after working without shoes in the winter of 1893, according to an account given by Hall to local newspapers. Instead of being treated, the boys were locked in a cell for days with no bed and only a thin blanket to guard against the cold as the pain in their feet worsened, Hall said.

Both were hospitalized and had their legs amputated. Hall survived, but Salisbury died.

A grand jury concluded that neglect by House of Reformation officials led to his death. But the death certificate reduced the cause to a single phrase: blood poisoning.

He was buried in a potter’s field in Baltimore, records show. But many others who became ill at the House of Reformation never left the grounds, and the majority of those who died there ended up in the woods.

The earliest published mention of the graveyard that The Post could identify came in 1885, in a short death notice for Samuel Folks published in the Evening Capital newspaper.

“A tombstone bearing his name and date of death was placed over his grave by the inmates of the institution,” the notice reads, “as a mark of respect and esteem for their deceased friend.”

In the early 1900s, negative reports about the facility’s condition began to draw scrutiny. In 1929, Baltimore state delegate Melvin L. Fine warned in the Baltimore Sun that instead of fulfilling its mission to “reform and instruct boys committed to its care” the institution relied on a “pernicious system” of forced labor.

In the years that followed, news reports documented an escalating pattern of mistreatment: overcrowded rooms with no ventilation, boys underfed and left in “disease-breeding conditions,” and abuse by facility staff.

In 1934, Aubrey Brunson, 21, was shot and wounded by a White guard after he refused to get in line for food, according to a report in the Afro-American. Weeks later, Harry Brown, another boy there, told the newspaper in an article headlined “Maryland’s Hell Hole” that officials were hiding some deaths. They weren’t embalming bodies, he said, or notifying parents when boys died.

On one occasion, Brown said, a child’s parents were told that their son had run away, records show, something that House of Reformation staff commonly reported about missing boys. But, Brown told the newspaper, “the truth is that I had helped bury that boy just the night before.”

Soon a grand jury would condemn the institution as “deplorable and unsanitary,” urging the state to shut it down, the Sun would report. Gov. Harry Nice called the House of Reformation “a blot on the good name of the state.”

In 1937, Maryland took full control of the institution.

A failure to act

As Brailey walked through the graveyard in 1972, a local farmer who had been working the land nearby for many years told him that it was “nothing” to plow up human remains.

“Arms, legs, and skulls,” the farmer said in the Afro-American.

The superintendent for the facility – by then renamed the Boys’ Village of Maryland – told Brailey that the graveyard had not been used since 1936, though death records show at least one teen died and was buried there in 1939.

It does not appear that state officials followed up after Brailey’s visit, according to an analysis of newspaper archives and other documents. A search of statehouse records did not locate any related legislative proposals.

Soon, though, state officials would return to the woods – not to restore the boys’ graveyard, but for the new veterans cemetery right next door.

In 1974, the state selected land owned by the juvenile facility to build the Cheltenham Veterans Cemetery, adjacent to a parcel containing the neglected graveyard. The boys’ burial ground is noted in a 1975 pre-construction survey and land deed transfer signed by then-governor Marvin Mandel.

Officials with the Department of Veterans and Military Families, which owns the land, say the state has not touched the boys’ graveyard in the 50 years since.

Separate initiatives over several decades to nominate the old House of Reformation grounds to the National Register of Historic Places were unsuccessful.

One application in 1974 included a photograph of a weathered headstone from 1885. A 2009 nomination form was more comprehensive. A surveyor hired by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission photographed headstones and counted approximately 100 cinder blocks.

Upon the commission’s recommendation, the Prince George’s County Council designated the graveyard as a historic site a year later, and state officials notified the secretary of the Maryland Department of Veterans and Military Families of the designation. But no efforts were launched to investigate the deaths and no action was taken to restore the site.

The headstones kept crumbling.

‘These boys deserve better’

Rosemary Clark had been hoping for years that someone would do something about the House of Reformation’s forgotten graveyard.

Clark, who grew up in Prince George’s County, had learned of the buried boys there in 2021, when she stumbled upon a death certificate for a teen “inmate” while doing family genealogy research. Then she found another, and another, eventually uploading dozens of their records to the Find A Grave website in hopes that it would prompt wider interest.

Then early this year, Clark received an email from a staffer at the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services asking for her help.

A longtime maintenance employee at the Cheltenham juvenile facility had told department officials about the abandoned graveyard in the woods. Armed with maps from the Maryland State Archives, they went searching for the graves in October 2024, accompanied by students from the Cheltenham detention facility, their parents and prison reform advocate Tyrone Walker, detained there as a teen in the 1990s.

When they found the graves, they decided to pray. And, prompted by the students, they decided to act.

Had he been born at a different time, Walker said, one of those graves could have been his.

“We can’t unknow this,” he said. “This ain’t just a cemetery. That’s a crime scene to me.”

Department staff consulted with historians and several archaeology experts, including renowned forensic anthropologist Erin Kimmerle.

Kimmerle had led a years-long excavation project at the Dozier School for Boys in Florida, a reform facility where officials had buried at least 51 kids who died in state custody. After walking the graveyard grounds herself, she explained to state officials that ground-penetrating radar would be the least intrusive way to locate all the boys.

In June, the Department of Juvenile Services submitted its grant application to the African American Heritage Preservation Program. If they receive the $31,000, officials said they would explore other funding sources for an ambitious restoration project.

A decision on the grant won’t be made until December.

“Our history is our power,” Moore’s office said in its statement, “and everyone shares responsibility in preserving and uplifting the countless stories of our state that have often gone unrecognized and unheralded.”

Since learning about the graveyard, Clark had put off a visit – worried she’d be overwhelmed. But by late August she was ready, and walked into the woods.

Clark pushed away brush with her walking stick as she searched for gravestones with her husband and Schiraldi’s former deputy secretary, Marc Schindler.

“There’s one here,” said Schindler, pointing to a stone slab lodged at the base of a tree.

Clark took in the scene: A headstone half-swallowed by dirt. Soil dipping gently where each boy was laid to rest. A footstone etched with J.B. that had toppled over. Another, hidden under brush, bore the name Mark Davis of Baltimore. “Died Feb. 3, 1885,” it read. “Aged 13.”

She spotted what appeared to be orderly rows of now unmarked graves.

Some headstones probably vanished years ago – carried off as souvenirs or sunken into the earth, Clark said. Where the graves were marked only by cinder blocks, hordes of bees darted in and out of pinprick holes.

The woods, Clark said, were more serene than she had imagined. Now that it appears efforts are underway to honor the site, she wrestled with what honoring means. Should the woods be cleared and the boys’ graves restored? Should their bodies be exhumed to determine cause of death, or left undisturbed? And with so few records, could their relatives ever be traced?

Clark looked across the expanse of graves.

“This is scandalous,” she said. “And these boys deserve better than this.”