Institutions

Lane Street Project: a request to Councilmember Morgan for information.

If you’ve been down Bishop L.N. Forbes Street in the last few months, you will have noticed the gravel laid alongside the Lane Park ballfields under fluttering pennants and, occasionally, mass staging of heavy equipment at the site. Last night, I submitted the letter below to Councilmember Gillettia Morgan, requesting information about this development; about potential utility work by Piedmont Natural Gas on B.L.N.F.; and, of course, the mysterious designation of Vick and Odd Fellows Cemeteries as “vacant” on future land use maps.

If you head down to City Hall in the next twenty minutes, perhaps you can ask Morgan these questions in person. Let me know.

Lane Street Project: connections to Green Street Cemetery.

I’ve sung the praises of Iredell County Public Library and its commitment to Green Street Cemetery and was thrilled to be asked to speak about my family’s connections to that historic burial ground.

I was overjoyed — see how I’m grinning?– to see my 91 year-old cousin Natalie Renwick Marsh (who is always so fly!) and her eldest daughter Angela Miller. Nat’s mother and my grandmother were sisters, born and raised in Statesville.

I got to Statesville early enough to visit Green Street Cemetery for the first time in nearly a decade. Fewer than ten percent of the 1800+ graves in the cemetery are marked with headstones.

But my great-great-grandfather John Walker Colvert (1851-1921) and his wife Adeline Hampton Colvert (1864-1940) have a fine gray marble double headstone flanked by concrete planters.

A few feet away, a small monument at the grave of their daughter Selma Eugina Colvert, who died in a house fire. (Another daughter, Henrietta R. Colvert, was a longtime nurse in Wilson.)

The broken headstone of siblings Lena and Raymond Tomlin was uncovered after radar detected it just below the soil’s surface. They were my great-grandfather Lon W. Colvert’s maternal half-siblings. I knew of Lena, but this is the sole record of Raymond’s short life.

Eugene Stockton was the second husband of my great-grandfather’s paternal half-sister Ida Mae Colvert Stockton.

Dillard Stockton was her first husband (and Eugene’s half-brother.) He was killed in a sewer cave-in two years after they married.

After ground-penetrating radar pinpointed the locations of graves, volunteers turned out en masse to mark each unmarked grave with a steel disk. As explained: “The marker consists of a ten inch (10”) bolt with a three and a half inch (3.5”) disk at the top. Once installed, it will lay flush with the earth allowing maintenance to continue as usual with no disruption or damage to the markers. In time, when the ground cover grows over the markers, they will still be identifiable with a metal detector, similar to markers used by land surveyors. They are easy to install by pushing the bolt into the ground by hand or using rubber mallets.” What an idea. (Looking at you, City of Wilson.)

Photos by Lisa Y. Henderson, February 2024.

County schools, no. 2: Mitchell School, no. 2.

We first visited Mitchell School here. Mitchell was not a Rosenwald School. Rather, it was built by the county school board on land formerly owned by James G. Mitchell, a prosperous African-American farmer who lived west of Elm City.

When I first photographed Mitchell School in 2020, it was crowded on every side by pine saplings and catbrier. I recently got word that the lot had been cleared of overgrowth, exposing the school and the motley collection of trailers that surround it. The school is in amazing condition given its age and disuse. Though one of the two entrances was open, I could not access the interior because of a collapsed stoop. The property is said to have a new owner, and I hope he or she is aware of the building’s legacy.

The school has a double entrance. The westernmost is boarded up. The easternmost, below, is open, but not easily accessible. Note the solid, standing-seam roof.

The interior, as far as I could peer in. It’s junk-filled, but dry. (I don’t think this was a “little red schoolhouse,” by the way. It appears that only the area within the entry alcove was painted.)

From the west, looking east.

Mitchell School was converted to a dwelling after its closure, but seems not to have been occupied for many years. A house trailer stands directly in front of the building at a distance of perhaps twenty feet.

The eastern elevation.

Photos by Lisa Y. Henderson, February 2024.

Saving sacred spaces.

My little Black History Month lecture circuit capped Saturday with a conversation at Raleigh’s Mount Pleasant Baptist Church about the importance of preserving church and cemetery histories. A snippet of my intro:

“Three years after starting my personal genealogy blog, I created another in which I chronicle the African American history and families of Wilson County. This blog, called Black Wide-Awake, speaks names all but forgotten in my home community. As I researched for the blog, I gained a deeper understanding of the need to look for evidence of the past outside the readily available archival sources. We were not the registers of deeds, clerks of court, newspaper reporters, archivists, or librarians who determined whose lives were worth recording. But the spaces we did control are often rich repositories, and we find two such spaces in multiple forms in every community. They are the church and the cemetery. As archival sources, however, both are in peril.

“Mount Pleasant is blessed to be the steward of both church and cemetery. You are a living museum. Throughout African-American history, our faith institutions have supplied so much more than spiritual sustenance. They have been community centers, promoters and providers of education, financial safety nets, healthcare centers, and guides for civic engagement. They have been everything … and the church.

“How do we protect these living archives? How do we ensure that future generations can access detailed evidence not only of individual lives, such as that I found for my great-grandmother [in church records], but of the institutions that have played such fundamental roles in building and sustaining our communities?”

——

On top of the warm welcome I received from all attendees, yesterday was practically Old Home Week. My mother and I met a cousin of my father’s faithful friend and mechanic, Robert Shackleford, as well as a Gill related to my cousin’s former wife. We just missed meeting — she had to step out early — a woman who worked with my father in Rocky Mount. As I began recounting Lane Street Project’s work, I spotted dear Dr. Judy Wellington Rashid and Rev. A. Kim Rieves in the back. Dr. Michael Barnes, who was also at my Rosenwald talk Thursday, was there — and saw Dr. Judy for the first time in 50 years! To top it off, I got to hug Adrienne Silvey’s neck for the first time in a decade.

Thank you to Angela Allen (who has Wilson roots!) for reaching out to me with this opportunity and to Rev. Dr. Anthony Bailey for embracing the idea so fully. Best wishes to Mount Pleasant as the church embarks on its preservation journey.

Mount Pleasant Baptist Church’s Spiritual Lecture Series.

I’m thrilled to take part in Mount Pleasant Baptist Church’s Black History Month Spiritual Lecture Series this year. On Saturday, February 10, at 11:00 A.M., in keeping with the theme Preserve Your Roots, Ignite Your Future, I’ll be speaking on “Saving Sacred Spaces: How and Why We Must Preserve African American Church History.” I hope to see some of you in Raleigh.

Lane Street Project: season 4, workday 3.

The weather has not been kind early this season, but we’re getting it done. Scarborough House Resort always comes through, and both Senior and Junior Force put in work!

We have a clear path now to the pile of headstones midway back in the cemetery. This is where I found my great-grandmother Rachel Barnes Taylor‘s marker in January 2021. Every season we have to release it from the previous summer’s outlandish wisteria growth, but perhaps this will be the last time. If we can clear the ground around this pile, we can begin to probe for more markers buried under decades of leaf mulch.

The Junior Force is continuing its fence beautification project.

Odd Fellows Cemetery has not looked this good in half a century. Special thanks to the City of Wilson’s sanitation crews for removing our work day debris.

Our next work days are February 9 and 23. Celebrate Black History Month with us!

Photos and video courtesy of Jen Kehrer. Please consider Scarborough House Resort for all your event venue and bed-and-breakfast needs!

Recommended reading, no. 17: Sandy Level Cemetery Burial Records.

I added Bailey and Bailey’s Sandy Level Cemetery Burial Records to my little local history set yesterday. Sandy Level is in Nash County, but this is a valuable Black Wide-Awake resource for many reasons.

(1) Sandy Level Cemetery is on present-day Stoney Hill Church Road at Bailey Road, less than three miles from the Wilson County line. Extended families often straddled the line between Nash County’s Bailey and Jackson townships and Wilson County’s Old Fields township.

(2) Sandy Level A.M.E. Church established the cemetery circa 1900. (The church itself was formed before 1875, and Willis Cone was an early trustee.) Mount Carmel A.M.E. of Bailey, which is still active (and my mama’s church!), was more or less its successor. Dozens of church members are buried in Sandy Level, but the cemetery also seems to have become a community burial ground by mid-twentieth century.

(3) Many who left the Bailey area for different opportunities returned to Sandy Level for burial. Some only migrated 15 miles east to Wilson. Others joined the Great Migration North. And Mercy Hospital was the closest African-American hospital during the Jim Crow era, so many Nash County residents buried in Sandy Level actually died in Wilson.

(4) The Baileys’ book is an exemplar for recording and preserving African-American church and cemetery history. The 154 known burials are presented alphabetically, with a brief description drawn from obituaries or death certificates.

If you’re interested in ordering a copy of Sandy Level Cemetery Burial Records, please contact Margaret Bailey at baileym@uncw.edu. The book costs $25, shipping is $5, and the order turn-around time is impressive.