This past January, Google Maps updated its streetview images of Bishop L.N. Forbes Street, which was called Lane Street until about five years ago.

Here is Odd Fellows Cemetery in January 2025, just before our Season 5 cleanups began. The dry weeds needed cutting, but look at that visibility all the way through to the back of the lot — and those gleaming headstones. The goal, in case you wondered, is not to restore Odd Fellows to Day One conditions, but to remove dead or dying trees and invasive vines, weeds, and shrubs; locate, clean, and reset headstones if their original location is known; remove trash and debris; document burials; and otherwise restore recognition and dignity to this sacred space.

Same view in March 2022. This was Season 2. The headstones had not yet been cleaned and reset, and there was still a fair amount of wisteria to cut down. The ground inside the tree line was clean as a whistle. This was a rookie mistake. With a canopy free of wisteria, sunlight hit the ground for the first time in decades, and the weeds and wisteria shoots ran rampant. We now keep the ground mulched with pine needles and leaf fall.

June 2012, when Odd Fellows was in full jungle mode. That solid line of brush is what I had to hack through in December 2019 when I first entered what I then thought was Rountree Cemetery. When Lane Street Project began work a year later, this is what we encountered — but with taller trees.

April 2008. But for the power lines slicing across the upper corner (attached to the poles punched into Vick and Rountree Cemeteries in 1997), this gloomy vista seems timeless. Seventeen years ago, I didn’t know Odd Fellows Cemetery existed and had only the vaguest understanding of what had happened to Vick. It’s never too late for discernment, though, and I am grateful to all who have worked to restore honor to our city’s dead.