On a bend of English Bayou in rural Calcasieu Parish, an acre of ground that holds generations of Black, Creole and Indigenous families has spent the last several years looking less like a cemetery than a thicket. Fallen trees lie across what remains of a fence. Overgrowth swallows headstones. In one cracked, open tomb, bones have been left exposed to the weather. That is the scene organizers are asking volunteers to help change on October 17 and 18, when the Chloe African American Cemetery Preservation Association hosts a community cleanup.
The work is straightforward and physical: clearing fallen trees, brush and debris left behind by Hurricane Laura, the storm that came ashore near Cameron in August 2020 and pushed this already-fading burial ground further into the wilderness. Volunteers are asked to bring boots, gloves and goggles, and to bring hand clippers, shears or electric saws if they have them. Drinks and snacks will be provided. The cemetery sits off Shane Road, off East Opelousas Street, at the end of Manchester Road on the English Bayou. Program director Jed Duhon is the contact for anyone with questions.
What makes the cleanup unusual is how the cemetery was found again in the first place. It was not a government agency or a historical society that rediscovered it. It was a genealogist.
Terry O'Neal, who also goes by O'Neal-Hogan, spent roughly two and a half decades tracing her lineage, working through census records, homestead patents and DNA results. Her family roots run through the LeBleu Settlement, the old Creole community strung along the bayou near the town of Iowa. Two years ago, that research led her to a burial ground known variously as the Chloe Cemetery and St. Mary's Cemetery. In February of this year she finally traveled from her home in California to see it in person.
"When I came here to visit for the first time and seen this in person, I was heartbroken," she told KPLC. "I really was — to know that my great-grandmother is buried here and I have no idea where to find her."
That is the central problem the association is trying to solve: not just clearing land, but finding people. The cemetery's records are thin, and many of its graves are unmarked or lost. O'Neal has since filed for cemetery stewardship and founded the Chloe African American Cemetery Preservation Association, whose leadership team is made up largely of descendants of families buried there.
The history they are working to recover reaches back well before the cemetery had a name. According to the Black Cemetery Network, the site was formally dedicated in 1904, when Eulalie St. Mary conveyed one acre of land "to the inhabitants of Chloe" for use as a public cemetery — a transaction recorded with the Calcasieu Parish Clerk of Court, and the reason the place is still sometimes called St. Mary's. But historical records, oral histories and ongoing genealogical work indicate Black families were buried there earlier, in the decades after Emancipation.
Among those remembered at Chloe is James Alphonse, described in a 1943 newspaper account as "the last living slave of Major J.C. LeBleu." Alphonse's legacy, as the association frames it, did not end with bondage: he became a federal homesteader, a husband, a father and a patriarch of the community. The cemetery also holds formerly enslaved people, early freedmen landowners, military veterans and church leaders. Louise May LeBleu Tillman, a granddaughter of James and Josephine Alphonse, was buried there in 1920 at just twenty-five, during the closing years of the Spanish flu era.
The English Bayou community itself was a genuinely mixed world — African American, Creole, Atakapas Indigenous, Cajun, French and Spanish families who lived, worked and worshipped alongside one another for generations. That layered heritage is part of why the site matters to researchers as well as relatives. As the association puts it, protecting the cemetery safeguards a rare physical record of Black, Native and Creole life in rural Southwest Louisiana, one that reflects the labor and family networks that shaped the region.
For a project only in its first year, the preservation effort has moved quickly. Organizers have used LiDAR drone footage to map the grounds and are collaborating with the Imagining Ann Project and the Loftin-Levingston Slave Records initiative at McNeese State University. Dr. Senna Chapman of the Louisiana Division of Archaeology conducted a site visit and began GPS documentation and mapping of graves and cemetery boundaries. During that visit, volunteers and researchers relocated additional graves, including members of the Carter family, and found evidence that the cemetery may extend beyond its previously recognized footprint. The cemetery has been added to the Louisiana Register of Historic Cemeteries, and the association anticipates help from the Louisiana Disaster Task Force with heavier clearing work. Partnerships include the Louisiana Atakapas Eagle Tribe, BZ Farms & RV Park in Kinder, and the Southwest Louisiana Genealogical and Historical Library in Lake Charles.
The association's goals go beyond cutting brush. Its stated aims include identifying burial locations through historical records, oral histories and responsible archaeological research; stabilizing existing grave markers; placing respectful headstones or memorial markers on confirmed but unmarked graves; and developing educational materials about the cemetery and the community around it. Future ground-penetrating radar surveys — which financial contributions help fund — will be aimed at locating unmarked and lost graves.
The urgency is not abstract. Across the South, historic Black burial grounds have been paved over, sold off or simply left to vanish under weeds, and attacks on them have grown more visible in recent years. O'Neal is part of a growing network of people doing this work, descendants who organize cleanups and press local governments to acknowledge the dead beneath their feet. "Black achievements and our lives have been stolen and hidden since the beginning of this country," she told Capital B News. "It is like we are not meant to know our greatness."
For anyone who wants to help, the barrier to entry is low. The association welcomes descendants, historians, genealogists, educators, students, community organizations and anyone else interested. Volunteers can also contribute by sharing family histories, photographs and historical information, assisting with research, connecting descendants to the effort, or offering preservation expertise. But the most immediate need is simpler: show up on October 17 or 18 with boots, gloves and, if possible, a pair of clippers. Six years after Laura, someone has to be the first to walk back in.