SALEM, Mass. — In a far corner of Howard Street Cemetery, in a little bump-out area off the side of the burial site, three gravestones memorialize three Black residents of Salem who played a role in the abolitionist movement.

Two are broken into pieces. Shards of stone are receding into the earth. A project to restore the markers is evolving into a larger effort to find and restore the final resting places for other African American families who were buried and long forgotten.

The three stones — for Venus Chew, Prince Farmer (with unnamed wife Mary A. Farmer) and Samuel Payne — all date to 1851 and 1852.

Rachel Meyer, a conservator who’s worked in area cemeteries for years, said destroying the stones will also destroy history.

Apart from a few recently named parks, she said, no well-established streets or houses in this seaport settled in 1626 are named after members of the African American community.

The Howard Street Cemetery was established in 1801, originally called the Branch Street Cemetery, after an adjacent church, which dissolved in the mid-19th century.

“There is ample evidence that the Howard Street Church served as a hub for abolitionist activities in Salem over the first half of the 19th century, but it’s hard to pay tribute to a site that is no longer there,” local historian and blogger Donna Seger wrote at streetsofsalem.com this past spring.

“I can’t even come up with a photograph … which is really frustrating as the church was the creation of Samuel McIntire,” a famed woodworker with an entire historic district named after him.

The graves to be restored are in a corner of the cemetery. They occupy a square piece of land the city donated to expand the cemetery “to bury African Americans … and ‘strangers,’” she said.

The stones in question have fallen over in time and were sinking into the ground when an area resident contacted Meyer.

“It isn’t like people don’t know they’re there,” she said. “There are certainly people who know. They’re all there together, broken and lying down in a way that grass keeps accumulating over them. They’re being claimed by the earth.”

On Wednesday, Meyer presented to the Massachusetts Archaeological Society, describing the stories represented under each gravestone and what she found when beginning the project.

When lifting portions of Chew’s headstone, she discovered fragments for another underneath. Some feet away, portions of another broken stone are well concealed by the grass.

“It’s kind of a muddled history at this point, and I’m trying to piece it together,” Meyer said in an interview. “But the more I look, the more I find, and the more confused I get. Then I get off track because there are other stories in here that don’t have anything to do with abolition.”

Toward the end of the Society presentation, Meyer listed ways to help the project and ended on ground-penetrating radar, which she said “would uncover some of the lost graves we have the names for but haven’t found yet.”

Doreen Wade, president of Salem United, a group dedicated to preserving Black history and culture, said she’s enthusiastically behind the project.

More than just repairing fragmented gravestones, she said, it’s repairing a fragmented story of Salem’s past.

To Wade, it’s clear the graves were segregated in the cemetery. Another issue is that many people were buried without any indication of their race, she said, meaning it was effectively buried with them.

“In the Quaker cemetery, there’s supposed to be African American headstones,” she said, “and we’re going to start looking into that as well.”

For now, there’s more immediate work to do. The restoration in Howard Street Cemetery begins Sept. 1, Meyer said, because the stone repairs can’t wait.

As that plays out, research will endeavor toward identifying other graves.

Dustin Luca writes for The Salem News. Contact him at DLuca@salemnews.com.