The graves were found thanks to the combined efforts of Delaitre Hollinger, the immediate past president of the Tallahassee chapter of the NAACP, and Jeffrey Shanks, a park service archaeologist.

“When I stand here on a cemetery for slaves, it makes me thoughtful and pensive,” said Hollinger to the Associated Press. “They deserve much better than this. And they deserved much better than what occurred in that era.”

Hollinger, the descendant of slaves who died in Leon County, has been at the fore of a recent movement to memorialize and rediscover the hundreds of slave burial grounds extant in Tallahassee, once the hub of Florida’s plantation economy. At one time, 3 out of 4 people living within Leon County was a slave—but the number of preserved cemeteries are very low.

“A hundred years ago when the golf course was constructed there was certainly no technology to decipher what was or wasn’t here,” Jay Revell, Capital City Country Club’s historian and vice president of Tallahassee’s chamber of commerce, told the AP. He added that he thought the cemetery was so well-preserved because it had not been trammeled over often.

Shanks volunteered his services after Hollinger contacted Tallahassee city officials for help finding the graveyard after researching the plot and discovering an old newspaper article which talked about it. Shanks used radar and cadaver-sniffing dogs to locate the graveyard, scanning 7,000 meters of ground.

“It’s a really serious problem,” Shanks told the AP. “It’s not just a Florida problem. It’s really a problem across the Southeast.”

A task force has determined there may be over a thousand unmarked or deserted African American or slave cemeteries statewide.

“They were nameless on census records, and they are nameless and unremembered in death,” historian Jonathan Lammers, who wrote a report about what was once the Houstoun plantation property, said to the AP. “It’s safe to say that there are thousands upon thousands of these graves in Leon County and hundreds and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, across the Southeast that remain unknown today.”

Some want to fix this, memorializing the lost permanently. Work has begun on a national database to record the location of these burial sites, and there’s been discussion about forming an African American Burial Grounds Network.

“We want to identify covered-up graves that have been built upon, or destroyed, or obliterated from history,” state Senator Darryl Rouson told the AP. “Once identified, we’d like to do some type of memorial for those souls.”

The souls resting on the grounds of the Capital City Country Club will not be disturbed; there are no plans to have the remains of those buried there exhumed. But there has also been no decision made about how to memorialize those buried there as of press time.

Newsweek reached out to the Capital City Country Club and the Tallahassee chapter of the NAACP for comment but did not hear by press time.