All graves in the cemetery were moved to National Harmony Memorial Park in Landover, Maryland, in 1959.

The cemetery site was sold to developers, and a portion used for the Rhode Island Avenue – Brentwood Washington Metro station.

[15] In 1953, the society relocated the few graves at Huntsville to a nearby cemetery and sold its property for $178,000 to a real estate development company.

[16] In 1957, real-estate investor Louis N. Bell offered to buy Columbian Harmony Cemetery.

He offered the society a 25 percent stake in the new cemetery and to pay all relocation costs in exchange for the property in D.C.

The District of Columbia Department of Health had to draft and win approval of a whole new set of regulations to govern the mass relocation.

A D.C. district court agreed to issue a single exhumation order, rather than review thousands of cases.

All the heirs of those buried at Columbia Harmony Cemetery were contacted and their permission to move the graves secured.

[21] The headstones were sold as scrap and used to secure the riverbank of the Stuart Plantation, a 1400 acre conservation easement site on the banks of the Potomac in King George County, Virginia.

A nonprofit organization will reclaim as many of the headstones as possible and send them to National Harmony, and related memorial markers will be placed in both Maryland and Virginia.

[15] It brought to light a historic injustice in D.C.[15] When the Rhode Island Avenue – Brentwood Metro station was constructed in 1976, workers discovered that not all the bodies had been exhumed.

In 2009, hikers found a large number of headstones in the riprap lining the banks of the Potomac River, on privately owned land near Caledon State Park in King George County, Virginia.

Because the headstones were adjacent to the state park, the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation could only turn them over to a nonprofit.

[25] A number of nationally and locally important African Americans were buried at Columbian Harmony Cemetery.