One of Cahawba's oldest cemeteries appears on an eighteen nineteen map of the town, unlabeled, suggesting that from the beginning this area was set aside as a burial ground for Cahawba's enslaved people. An eighteen eighty-three map labels it "Negro burial ground." Although a square town block was originally intended for burials, graves were actually placed along a long narrow ridge to avoid low places in this flood-prone area. African American families continued to use the graveyard after emancipation, and the last known burial was in nineteen fifty-seven. Most marked graves are of people born into slavery, and although only a few headstones remain, there are also hundreds of sunken unmarked graves. This reflects Cahawba's population in eighteen sixty, when one thousand nine hundred twenty people lived within the town limits: one thousand two hundred were Black and seven hundred twenty were White.