NPR : Covert, Michigan: A History in Black and White: On the Midwestern frontier in the 1860s, the settlers of Covert, Mich., lived as peers, friends and sometimes even kin. What makes the story unusual is that they were both black and white.
The graveyard is eloquent testimony to their remarkable lives. There are hardscrabble pioneers and a lumberman whose tombstone has been cast from a tree trunk. The cemetery is one of very few in the country where black and white Civil War veterans lie together.
It's the sense of shared fate that attracted historian Anna-Lisa Cox to Covert. For more than a decade, she traced the tales of the town's pioneers. Earlier this year, she published a book on the subject.
The Roods -- Mayflower descendants -- came to Covert in the 1860s. So did the Pompeys, who were farmers and black soldiers.
'And they're actually about as close in the graveyard as they were in life,' Cox says.
Covert was not one of the abolitionist colonies established in the Midwest at the time, following an anti-slavery philosophy. Nor was it a free African-American settlement protected by the Quakers. It wasn't a utopian social experiment. It was, quite simply, tough frontier, and somehow it was a place where individuals laid the foundation for a culture of trust in one another.
And it endured.
