The parking lot at a Silver Spring grocery store was a cemetery for nearly 140 years.

It’s where Samuel Litton, for whom the Lyttonsville community of Silver Spring was named, is believed to have been buried in the late 19th century, and where his wife and their many children were laid to rest.

The Littons, according to those who have studied the history of the Mt. Zion Methodist Episcopal Church cemetery, were among potentially hundreds buried there between 1825 and 1964 — when the land was sold and developed.

Those buried at the site were believed to have been moved to another cemetery.

But considering that some graves were likely marked with objects like stones, and without records documenting exactly who was reinterred, it’s unclear if the Littons and countless others were ever moved.

“We are nearly 100% certain that what we will find is evidence of burials on the site,” said Pastor Will Ed Green of Silver Spring United Methodist Church.

Now, Green, another nearby church leader, community members and descendants of those once buried at Mt. Zion have reason to believe that not all remains were relocated when the site was developed. On Wednesday, they will test that belief.

The Maryland State Highway Administration and Green’s church have both hired surveyors who will use ground-penetrating radar devices to determine whether there is still evidence of burials at the site, which is now mostly a parking lot for an Aldi grocery store.

Green and other church leaders will lead a prayer and reconsecration service Wednesday morning as survey teams begin their radar testing. They’ll also hold a vigil, bearing witness to the surveying of the former burial site, throughout the day.

“In an ideal world,” Green said, “we test it all, we find our ancestors and we begin the work of figuring out what comes next.”

But if surveyors find no evidence of burial remains underground, those who’ve spent weeks researching the cemetery’s history may be left with more questions than they began with.

“This is just the beginning of what will likely be a many-year project,” Green said. “No work is more sacred than telling these stories.”

A look underground

State Highway Administration officials had known they would need to survey the site: They’re in the midst of a project to improve sections of Georgia Avenue, and a law requires projects receiving federal funding to determine their effect on historic and cultural resources.

Steve Archer, who works in the cultural resources section of the State Highway Administration, said work to move remains from one cemetery to another in the 1960s was “not always entirely thorough.”

A closed-down car wash also sits on part of the former cemetery site, next door to the Aldi parking lot. But surveyors cannot search there until the building is demolished.

Surveyors will use ground-penetrating radar machines — which look like push lawn mowers — to search for evidence of burial sites without digging up the ground.

The evidence could include human remains, coffin parts, clothing or items like nails, pins, buckles or buttons.

“It’s not X-ray vision,” Archer said. “It’s a little bit of data that helps us to understand the range of possibilities of what may be there.”

Archer said his team won’t have definitive answers the day of the testing. He said they may receive a summary of findings within a couple of weeks.

Most of the former cemetery site lies beneath the Aldi parking lot. The grocer leases the property from Bethesda-based Finmarc Management Inc.

Church leaders said they asked for Finmarc’s permission to conduct ground-penetrating radar on the lot, free of cost to the property company.

Finmarc denied their initial request. But after some back-and-forth with the pastors, the company agreed to allow surveyors on the lot on Wednesday and Thursday. The church will spend nearly $16,000 to pay for a contractor to survey the lot.

Stephen Halle, executive vice president at Finmarc, declined to say why the property company initially denied the request.

A shared history

Mt. Zion was established as Sligo Methodist Episcopal Church in 1825 by families who owned the majority of enslaved African Americans in southern Montgomery County, Green said.

At the time, it was the only Protestant congregation in the area.

Black people were forced to sit in the back pews.

The issue of slavery, over which the broader Methodist church split in two in 1844, fractured the Sligo congregation throughout the 19th century.

A group of whites who supported slavery left to form what is now Grace Episcopal Church in Silver Spring. The remaining members of Sligo Methodist split in 1873, with white members setting up two congregations that have since reunited to form Silver Spring United Methodist Church — Green’s congregation.

Black members remained at the original property and eventually adopted a new name for the congregation: Mt. Zion.

The congregation included some of the most influential Black leaders in the area, many of whom helped establish what was once a thriving African American community in Lyttonsville.

This included Samuel Litton, a free man who bought a four-acre farm during a time when white families were selling land to Black people, both those born free and the formerly enslaved, historian David Rotenstein wrote in a report for the Montgomery County Planning Department.

The Safeway supermarket chain purchased the land from the congregation in 1964 for just $10, according to the deed from the transaction.

Some families connected to the church have said the sale was actually for around $300,000, but either way, the Black congregation received at least $1 million less than what the white congregation down the road got for their land in a separate deal.

The Black congregation relocated to Washington, D.C., and formed what is now Van Buren United Methodist Church — the second church seeking answers about those once buried at Mt. Zion.

Hundreds of burials

Mt. Zion’s earliest burial records are from the late 19th century or early 20th century — roughly 75 years after the cemetery opened.

The cemetery was integrated until the congregation split and one of the new white churches set up their own burial site. For its last 100 years, Mt. Zion was a Black cemetery.

Based on cemeteries of the era, it’s likely the plot included the remains of enslaved people, who would have been buried at the back of the cemetery — near what is now the Aldi entrance — or outside the cemetery bounds in poorly marked or unmarked graves.

Green has found documentation or family member confirmation for 37 people buried at Mt. Zion, and he’s identified about 55 others who he says were likely buried there, considering that one or more of their immediate family members were also interred there.

After Safeway purchased the land, people buried there were thought to have been moved to Maryland National Memorial cemetery in Laurel.

But those familiar with the cemetery’s history say there are no records showing whose remains were moved from the Mt. Zion cemetery.

On a recent visit to Maryland National, Green said he found headstones for six of the people formerly interred at Mt. Zion. And he found no markers signaling that unnamed remains from Mt. Zion lie in the cemetery.

Even for the six, Green said it may be just as likely that only their headstones were moved — meaning their remains could still be at the Mt. Zion site.

Reparations

Green took on research about the cemetery as part of a larger push for his congregation to make reparations for the benefits they continue to reap from decisions made by earlier members of the church.

Among the driving reasons for Green is knowledge that there were once about 80 Black worshipping communities in Montgomery County.

But racist zoning policies and the clearing out of certain areas through urban renewal have driven the number down to 10, he said.

Nearly half of his church building will be demolished in the coming years to make room for affordable housing that will include more than 120 rental units and 12 townhomes, 10 of which will be available for purchase. Clergy members will live in the other two.

Tenants are expected to begin moving in by 2029.

Green said his hope is for the project to house congregants of Van Buren United Methodist, the Black church in D.C. whose roots are at the site.

Patricia Tyson, who was a Mt. Zion member in her early 20s when the congregation moved to Van Buren, said she remembers her father purchasing a plot at Maryland National for her family.

Tyson, now 83, said it’s become increasingly difficult to keep track of the descendants of those who belonged to Mt. Zion or were buried in the cemetery. Many Mt. Zion members and their relatives have died. Urban renewal displaced whole communities. Others moved away.

Her hope for Wednesday is that “anyone who belonged to the church and had a relative [buried] there comes and is with us.”

There is also hope that part of the site, likely where the old car wash now sits, will soon feature a memorial to the church and cemetery that were once there.

Van Buren United Methodist Pastor Lucinda Kent envisions a stone structure. She said it’s a way to not just tell the story of Mt. Zion, but to help the two churches that descended from it to fully reconcile.

“It’s never too late to do that,” she said. “Even though a generation may have passed away, it’s just never too late.”

A previous version of this story referred to Samuel Lytton, his name as it appears in some histories of Lyttonsville. His name should be spelled Samuel Litton, according to Pastor Lucinda Kent and Pastor Will Ed Green. This story has been updated to reflect more recent information on the number of people buried and likely buried at Mt. Zion.