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Lucille St. Hoyme from the Smithsonian Institution holds the skull recovered from the African American cemetery uncovered by bulldozers in 1959, during work on the Shapiro tract. The land would eventually become Walter Pierce Park. At the time, the Zoo director, Dr. Theodore Reed told the Washington Star (May 23, 1959) that he understood that it was a slave cemetery. The Zoo had incorporated part of that cemetery into its land in 1889. In 1963, when that area was proposed as a property yard, Reed said in a Zoo memo that there may be bodies still in that area.