The draft report by Edwards and a co-author concluded that the grain elevator would have “an adverse effect on historic properties.” The authors said they had determined that the entire area should be listed as a historic district in the National Register of Historic Places, the federal government’s roster of sites deemed worthy of preservation.
Edwards had included a sentence that she believed was suggestive if not definitive about an underexamined aspect of the land: the possibility that it contained as-yet undiscovered graves. “Thus far, no enslaved cemeteries have been found for either Whitney or Evergreen Plantations,” another nearby and unusually intact plantation where the movie “Django Unchained” was filmed, “despite hundreds of enslaved people being kept there for over 155 years.”
Three months after Edwards handed in her report, in October 2021, Gulf South filed to the state a document with the same title as the one Edwards wrote but with some notable edits.
The determination of the historic district, the findings about the impact on Whitney and the community around it, and the lone sentence about unknown graves had all been removed. The report now concluded that “the project would not result in an adverse effect.”
The rewrite came after the contractor Greenfield hired to handle the permitting process pressured Gulf South, according to emails obtained by ProPublica. Gulf South was warned that if the firm didn’t take out Edwards’ key finding — that the entire area was a historic district — it would lose the contract.
“They are refusing to accept it,” Gulf South’s head of cultural resources, Mike Renacker, wrote about Edwards’ report in an email to an internal team. “They are willing to tear up the contract and fire us.” As written, the report “has the potential to not only cost us our contract and future work, but might end the overall project as well.”
Edwards was shocked. “It is unethical for a client to tell us what our findings are,” she replied in an email. “They came to us for our expertise, and they got a professional report that is factual.”
“Our reputation will be that we can be bought,” she added.
Renacker replied: “I’m not suggesting, nor would I ever suggest that we do something unethical. I’m not questioning your methods or even the recommendation. What I am doing is laying out the problem we are having and asking for help to find a solution.”
After Edwards’ bosses changed her report, she resigned from her job of seven years.