Georgianna L. Johnson-Coafou died on October 6, 2026, at the age of 101, and the burial ground she went home to now carries a historical marker.
She was born August 5, 1925, in Selma, North Carolina, and nursed for more than two decades at Riverview Nursing Home in Philadelphia before retiring in 1987. In 1996, the year she turned 71, she went back to Harleyville, South Carolina, where the Dorchester Cemetery had been left to fall in. It is 25 acres, founded in 1876 during Reconstruction, and relatives could not find the graves they had come for.
She did not clear it alone and never set out to. She formed the Dorchester Cemetery Association, persuaded five area churches to join and pay dues, and a sixth has been added since. Members raised nearly $3,000 for the application that made the cemetery a South Carolina historic site in 2023. An estimated 300 or more graves there are still unidentified.
“I was going there and clean up and straighten up some flowers on the graves,” she said at her 100th birthday celebration in August 2025, where the parade had fire engines and police cars in it. Henry Lary, of Harleyville, said the place had been in really foul shape, and added, “So I give her all the credit.”
Asked that day what she wanted said about her, she kept it to one line. “Well, all I can say I want them to say about me, that I helped people.”
