The St. Mark's Heritage Trail, opened in the spring of 2023, is the Roberson Project's largest undertaking to date. The endpoints of its one-mile course are the popular Stirling's Coffee House on the north, and the newly renovated and revived St. Mark's Community Center on the east. Today the trail is in a raw and under-developed form, but in coming years the Roberson Project will work with people rooted in Sewanee's Black neighborhood to cultivate it as a place for community art and public history projects and other features that preserve and tell Sewanee Black history. But even in its nascent form, the St. Mark's Heritage Trail reconnects the central academic campus to the historic Black neighborhood, the first step in reversing the erasure of local Black history and restoring this increasingly forgotten area to the recognition of the larger Sewanee community.  

In 2018-19 the Roberson Project began working with descendants of the St. Mark's neighborhood who still lived in the region. With the assistance of a Common Heritage Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the partnership staged two "digitization fairs" on Memorial Day and July 4th weekends in 2019. Harvesting virtual copies of families' artifact, photos, and oral histories, the Save Sewanee Black History days formed the foundation of a virtual archive and website, blacksewanee.org. This project became the basis of our work to collect, preserve, and tell the stories and histories of Black Sewanee.

In July 2022, the Roberson Project installed and dedicated five historical markers in the St. Mark's neighborhood – the first official and public recognition of the community's long history. Undergraduate students working with the Roberson Project interviewed neighborhood residents and descendants to identify five places of importance to be recognized. Click here to learn more about the markers.

In February-March 2021 the Roberson Project brought in archaeologists from the University of Tennessee Knoxville to conduct a ground-penetrating radar scan of the historic Black cemetery. The examination of the one-plus acre burial ground revealed more than 130 unmarked and invisible graves. Discussions with the cemetery's stakeholders to decide how to memorialize the persons in these graves are currently underway.

The University of the South built and opened a segregated swimming pool for the town's Black residents in 1957. At a time when Black southerners rarely had such amenities, the "Swim Pool," as locals called it, quickly became an attraction for African Americans from throughout the region. With desegregation, the University withdrew its support for the pool, which rapidly became a neighborhood nuisance. It was filled in sometime in the late 1960s. Many of the neighborhood's descendants remember the "Swim Pool" fondly and wish for its ruins to become a neighborhood amenity of place-based memory again. The Roberson Project is working with them to partner with an artist to revive the pool in a new community art form. 

The St. Mark's Community Center, opened in 1997 and showing its age, has undergone a thorough renovation over the last twelve months: new heating and air system, extensively renovated "plumbing," new chairs, newly installed porch railings and repaired access, and fresh coats of paint throughout. This extensive work to refurbish the facility was undertaken by a coalition of the Roberson Project, the revitalized St. Mark's Community Association, and various civic groups, including Housing Sewanee, the Sewanee Civic Association, and the Sewanee Community Chest. It now serves as an important anchor to the neighborhood's past, present, and future. A new grant of $20,000 from the South Cumberland Community Fund has launched the design and creation of a community garden that will serve the regional community.