More than 120 years after his death, local historians finally feel confident of the burial spot for the first Black man to vote in Illinois.
A reddish granite headstone sits in a quiet plot near the back of El Paso’s Evergreen Cemetery. It proudly bears the name David A Strother.
“He voted on Monday, April 4, 1870 in an El Paso City election,” the stone reads. “The first Negro ballot ever cast as a result of the fifteenth amendment.”
The El Paso American Legion Post 59 erected that stone in 1954 as part of El Paso’s centennial celebration. Strother’s obituary and cemetery records claim he was buried there along with his brother, mother and wife. However, there were no original headstones for any of them.
Barb Lancaster with the Project XV voting rights museum in El Paso has wondered for a long time if Strother and his family are resting in that plot.
“My family and friends would tease me that I love my dead people and it's true, I do. And they don't have to be relatives, although I've studied David and his family enough that they do feel like family to me,” Lancaster said.
On a comfortable August morning, several volunteers and local history buffs gathered around Strother’s 1954 headstone to find out for certain if he and his family lay underneath.
Lancaster said the Project XV board was introduced to Illinois State University anthropology professor Logan Miller through the McLean County Museum of History.
The group won’t have to break ground to solve the mystery. Miller presented what looked like a three-wheeled baby stroller with a safety-orange box sitting on the ground where the baby carrier would sit.
That orange box was a ground penetrating radar device. Miller said it works by emitting waves underground and measuring how quickly or slowly those waves bounce back. That can show if there are any disturbed soil or stones underground.
“What we get are blobs, basically,” Miller said. “So ideally, we see a rectangle and then at the head a smaller square that would be a [grave] marker.”
To get the best results, the group captured the radar readings in 20-centimeter “slices,” laterally and vertically across the 4- by 6-meter plot. The group rolled the ground penetrating radar device back and forth, over and over again, in straight lines.
Bloomington-Normal NAACP Chapter President Linda Foster-Caruth joined the search, pushing the device and helping other volunteers measure out 20 cm sections.
Foster-Caruth is glad to help tell Strother’s story more than a century later.
“We always know there's a first, and to just think that he was it,” she said, “and he probably didn't think it. I think he just probably thought that — if I had to guess — he probably thought that 'I was just doing my civic duty.'”
It actually took two attempts for Strother to cast his ballot. He arrived at the polling place alongside then-Mayor James Wathen, but the election judges did not believe the amendment was ratified and adopted.
The judges sent for a copy of the amendment, according to Project XV, and then allowed Strother to vote after they confirmed it.
“Mr. Strother took that leap of faith,” Foster-Caruth said, “and he took it a couple of times.”
Just like the man the group seeks to honor and remember, the first attempt to search underground yielded few results. On the second run, though, Miller said the group found evidence of four graves underneath.
“The GPR survey produced subtle yet clearly visible anomalies in the area in front of David Strother’s monument,” Miller’s report read. “These subtle near surface and subsurface anomalies are consistent with burial practices in the late 1800s – early 1900s which likely included burial in a wood coffin and covering the burial with the same soil removed in digging the grave.”
Lancaster said this does not identify the individuals buried below, but the numbers add up. They were looking for four burial sites and found four anomalies underneath.
However, there is no evidence of original headstones for Strother, his mother, his brother or his wife. Lancaster thinks they all deserve headstones and will start fundraising to place a memorial marker for the whole family.
“David was a fantastic, amazing character, but his mother was, his brother was and his wife was, too. They all have really interesting stories and they all deserve to be remembered,” she said.
About David Strother and his family
Strother was born on Aug. 18, 1843, and died on March 12,1905. According to Project XV, he was born the son of an enslaved couple in Lexington, Missouri.
As a boy, he worked as a cook and travelled the Mississippi River on a steamboat and eventually worked as a civilian cook with Company G of 17th Illinois Infantry.
According to Project XV, 44 of the men in Company G hailed from El Paso and urged Strother to join them back home.
He eventually set up shop as a barber. Strother married his wife, Elizabeth Gaines Strother in 1887. His mother, Leah, and brother, Charles, eventually joined him. Charles joined his brother’s barber shop business. The original barber shop in Downtown El Paso has been renovated as one of Project XV's signature exhibits.
Charles died in 1897. Elizabeth died in 1901, but it is unclear when Leah died.
