 We're near the water park, but this is a cemetery that is all African American burials that go back more than 200 years. Researcher Paul McRae with Nova Park says in the mid-1700s, this land was owned by Robert Carter III, one of the richest men in America, with plantations all over Virginia. In the early 1790s, he did something that no one else had done in America. He decided to free his 500 enslaved people.