Once you see them, you can’t not see them. A burial alters soil density and, especially in the era of wooden caskets, chemistry. More than six decades after the last burials at Vick Cemetery, and despite the complete resculpting of the ground’s surface when the cemetery was cleared and graded in the 1990s, hundreds of graves still reveal themselves as rectangular areas of grass growing thicker and greener than the surrounding groundcover.

Photos by Lisa Y. Henderson, May 2025.