About a year ago, I started but never published a post with the same title as this one: “are there graves UNDER the road?” However, I couldn’t get a handle what I thought about the possibilities, and I finally deleted the draft a couple of months ago.
I’ve written quite a bit about the development of what we now call Bishop L.N. Forbes Street, which started as a farm track and then became a narrow dirt road fitfully maintained. I’ll remind you that the stretch of road between Sandy Creek and the elbow at Lane Park was not paved until the late 1980s. A few years before the City finally laid asphalt, a jogger found bones in the ditch “about 10 feet from a grave that had been capped with concrete.” The Daily Times spoke Bill Bartlett in Public Works, who advised that about 1980, the City attempted to “define” the road and found, because of the numerous graves in the area, it could only be widened sufficiently to allow a 40- to 45-foot — instead the usual 60-foot –right of way. A former county sanitation worker reported that he’d received a call from a woman who believed her relatives might be buried under Lane Street. Bartlett told the paper that the worker “was going to look into that for me. It could be that we need to find out who that could be and see if they want to do some digging out there to remove the remains.”
S0, in 1985, Public Works thought it was at least possible that graves lay under Lane Street/Bishop L.N. Forbes Street, and that was pretty much my answer when city officials posed the question to me in February: “It’s possible.”
Given that possibility, I hope the City’s contract with New South Associates for additional ground-penetrating radar includes the street as part of the right-of-way to be surveyed in Phase I of the Vick Cemetery Plan.
I recently stumbled upon a report New South’s Georgia office prepared after surveying a patch of neighborhood in unincorporated DeKalb County, just outside Atlanta. It’s a cautionary tale.
Deacon Fred Kinnemore of Saint Paul Baptist Church spent over 50 years advocating for an investigation into his claims that family members and ancestors were resting under Wilson Road. Saint Paul was established in 1919 on a dirt track in what was then a rural area a couple of miles west of the town of Tucker. After enduring years of harassment from more recently arrived white neighbors and finding an unexploded pipe bomb in their basement, the congregation moved to Nelms Drive in 1949. However, their cemetery remained at the original site. By the late 1960s, developers had paved over a section of the graveyard, and for decades after Deacon Kinnemore’s protests and exhortations were essentially howls into the void.
Finally, in February 2021, archaeologists from New South Associates identified numerous geophysical anomalies at the site. Trenches confirmed the presence of at least one grave among 26 probable graves — all in the street or its current right-of-way.
DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond acknowledged the deacon’s persistence and issued an official apology for the county’s role in the desecration of the African American cemetery.
I went to see Wilson Drive for myself this week.
The cemetery is completely fenced in and sits on a larger 120′ by 150′ parcel still owned by Saint Paul. Bizarrely, immediately behind the cemetery are three houses that appear to have been built in the 1970s. The houses can be accessed only by a driveway that crosses the church’s lot just beyond the west end of the cemetery.
Within the cemetery, two granite markers are immediately visible. The small pile of stones in front of the fence may also be remnants of grave markers.
The cemetery sits in a bowl between the street and the houses.
“Donated by Dea. Fred Kinnemore & Family.” The other large marker stands at the graves of two Kinnemores.
The area in which most of the grave anomalies were detected. DeKalb County right-of-way setbacks for interior local streets like Wilson Road are 27.5′ on each side of a center line. (As in Wilson County, of course, right-of-way setbacks are relatively recent requirements, long post-dating the establishment of cemeteries like Saint Paul and Vick.)
There was a flurry of media coverage about the discovery of Saint Paul’s graves in February 2021. At the time, Michael Thurmond vowed to go to court to seek permission to move the graves. I’m researching the follow-up.
