Yesterday morning, I sent the mayor, all council members, a department head, and the communications director an email that read in pertinent part:

As usual, I received no acknowledgment of even receipt from any of the ten recipients. I’ll let you know when I do, but don’t hold your breath.

New South Associates returned to Vick Cemetery yesterday. They were not there to perform additional ground-penetrating radar work. Rather, in pursuit of the city’s obsession with throwing up a fence first and foremost, they came to mark grave anomalies on the city’s newly flagged boundaries. Vick Cemetery descendants and Lane Street Project monitors showed up throughout the day to observe New South’s work.

Here’s some of what they saw.

Small wooden stakes, numbered and spray-painted fluorescent orange, mark the head and foot of a grave anomaly. This grave, located perhaps ten feet from the edge of the ditch, lies well outside the surveyed property line and inside the public right-of-way.

The power poles are inside the Vick Cemetery boundary. The City did not file utility easements before or after setting high-voltage power poles in its own property, i.e. the cemetery, and the location of wooden markers clearly demonstrates that these poles were likely punched into graves.

Another view of pole 1 and guy wires discussed in yesterday’s post. The survey corner stake is adjacent to a stake reading RIGHT OF WAY EDGE.

The survey flag at the rear western corner of the cemetery. The yellow post is another natural gas pipeline marker.

This headstone is inside Odd Fellows Cemetery. The City erected the chainlink fence between Odd Fellows and Cemetery at an unknown date, but likely post-1996. In this photo, the survey flag stands at the fence.

Here’s another survey flag marking the boundary between Vick and Odd Fellows. (The vantage point faces toward the street.) Notice the gap between the fence and survey flag. This is what happens when there’s no plat map, and folk are eyeballing lines.

By the way, the strip of land along the fence was not subjected to ground-penetrating radar. We don’t know how many graves lie in this portion of Vick.

Finally, look at this: at the rear eastern corner of Vick Cemetery, the property line is in the woods outside the fence.

CITY OF WILSON, GET A SURVEY MAP OF VICK CEMETERY!

Thank you, B.S., for these photos!