Not that I needed affirmation, but …

When I found this stack of gravestones at the end of February 2020, I described the assemblage as a “broken granite marker support[ing] two intact concrete headstones, two marble footstones, and a few other chunks of rock.”

Yesterday, when I started prising the mound apart and snapping the wisteria runners that bound it, I quickly realized there was a whole lot more than had initially met my eye. And today — well, let me start where I ended:

Forgive me. Rachel Barnes Taylor was born in 1863 and died in 1925. (Her husband, my great-grandfather Henry Michael Taylor, died in 1927. Does his grave marker survive, too?) Her death certificate states only that she was buried in Wilson, N.C. I had not known if that meant Rountree or Odd Fellows or Vick cemetery. Odd Fellows it turns out. Nearly one hundred years after her death, I uncovered her stone face down, strapped to the earth by wisteria and covered in leaves and loam, in a jumble of more than two dozen other markers, several too broken to decipher. I’d say the ancestors approve of Lane Street Project.

I will speak more of Rachel Taylor later, but right now I want to call the names on the slabs I found with her:

• Bessie McGowan, 1888-1925, Gone But Not Forgotten
• Jesse Parker, 1890-1937, A Light From Our Household Is Gone
• Frank Scott
• Sunny Simms
• Rev. J.H. Scott, 1857-1940
• _____ Mercer
• Ed Hunter
• Rufus, son of James and Amelia Artis, 1900-1916, We Can Safely Leave Our Darling Harboring In Thy Trust
• Tempsey, wife of Rufus Speight, died 1917, age 75 years, Gone To A Brighter Home Where Grief Cannot Come
• M.E.S.
• Cha_____
• Omelia Artis
• Adeline, wife of Daniel S_____
• Johnnie, son of John and Lula McNeal, 1917-1917, Asleep in Jesus
• Belle, wife of A. Dewey, 1929, age 28, Gone But Not Forgotten
• James F. Scott, 1887-1939, Who Is Now With The Lord