El Dorado County cemetery ready to bury racial slur
By Carlos Alcalá, Sacramento Bee
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released documents Tuesday acknowledging it was responsible for using a racially inflammatory version of the name Negro Hill when that town’s cemetery was moved to El Dorado Hills to make way for Folsom Lake in 1954.
Negro Hill’s old cemetery – on the land between forks of the American River – was one of several moved when Folsom Dam was built.
Instead of saying Negro Hill, though, markers in the new Mormon Island Cemetery, to which bodies were taken, instead use a word too raw to use in the newspaper.
They say the bodies were moved from (N-word) Hill.
The markers don’t refer to those buried there – who were most likely of various races – but only to the town’s name.
“We don’t know why, when in so many other instances the cemetery was called Negro Hill, the new gravestones and our records use the more offensive word,” wrote Corps Lt. Col. Andrew B. Kiger, in an apologetic memo accompanying the released documents.
