While Wilson City Council is hiding in a general maintenance fund $125,000 earmarked for repairs to a decrepit arch at Maplewood Cemetery, weeds are galloping across Vick.
Photos by Lisa Y. Henderson, May 2022.
While Wilson City Council is hiding in a general maintenance fund $125,000 earmarked for repairs to a decrepit arch at Maplewood Cemetery, weeds are galloping across Vick.
Photos by Lisa Y. Henderson, May 2022.
The heavy invasion of wisteria throughout Odd Fellows Cemetery has created a woodscape very different from the nearby one I roamed as a child. The forest floor is nearly sterile, completely lacking the diverse native flora you would expect to find in a North Carolina Inner Coastal Plain woodland (even a young one). I was surprised, then, to come across this little ebony spleenwort as we stripped a dense cascade of vines from a gum tree last weekend.
I knew it wouldn’t tolerate being blasted by sunlight, so I went back to rescue it for transplant in my home garden. My shovel hit wisteria roots on every side, however, and I had to leave it.
Brushing back the leaf mold exposed the straps of root pinning this fern to the ground.
Most “deed” books stacked in the search room of the Wilson County Register of Deeds Office contain just deeds, but others, like Volume 72, contain miscellaneous records of sales agreements, leases, contracts, chattel mortgages, and other transactions. These documents offer rare glimpses of the commercial and farming lives of Black Wilsonians.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Aerial photographs shot in 1940 show the stark difference in the design and upkeep of segregated Maplewood and Vick Cemeteries.
We see Maplewood, founded in 1876 (and since expanded northwest across Hill Street), laid out in an orderly grid. The circle of trees, since removed, at the center of the first eight sections marks the location of the city’s Confederate monument, which was unveiled in 1902. The gateway arch is southwest of the monument, at Woodard Street.
And here we see Vick Cemetery — plus Odd Fellows and Rountree — on a dirt road outside city limits and surrounded by piney woods and corn fields. Vick, founded in 1913, is at left and takes up about two-thirds of what looks like a single graveyard, but is in fact three. There is no internal grid, no clearly marked access paths, no uniform spacing of graves or family plots. Certainly no Spanish Revival gateways or monuments to heroic ancestors. Though the city had established Rest Haven Cemetery in 1933, Vick remained active until the early 1960s, and hundreds of people were buried there in the 1940s alone. As poorly as it compares to Maplewood, Vick Cemetery never looked this good again.
We have, at most, three more organized Season 2 cleanups at Odd Fellows Cemetery — April 23, May 14, and May 21. The heat and fecundity of summer, as well as the hazardous insect and reptile life, make working in the woods more difficult than we can comfortably invite volunteers to do. For these reasons, it is critical that we maximize our time and effort in the coming weeks.
Here’s Odd Fellows on a recent April morning. The Senior Force has been putting in extra work every week and, for the first time in decades, a fifty-foot swath inside the tree line has been cleared.
In February 2020, almost a year before Lane Street Project began, I discovered a pile of headstones well back in the woods, evidence of some misguided earlier cleanup. The pile was nestled just behind an immense thicket of privet and wisteria and could only be reached by circuitous approach. This past February, I expressed hope to Castonoble Hooks that we would be able to break through the thicket and open a direct path to the headstones.
The Senior Force did it.
Circled below, Bessie McGowan‘s headstone at the edge of the pile that includes my great-grandmother Rachel Barnes Taylor‘s. The Senior Force, anchored by brothers Cass and Will Hooks, Briggs Sherwood, and Glenn Wright, demolished a seemingly impenetrable hedge to expose the interior of Odd Fellows cemetery.
Here are Bessie McGowan’s marker and the Jurassic forest that has sprung to life behind it in the last month. Everything green you see is wisteria, an invasive vine that has largely choked off native plant species.
In January, I placed Rachel Taylor’s headstone upright against a stump.
Here it is yesterday. This is what we’re up against, folks, and we can’t do it without you.
Saturday’s going to be beautiful. Please lend a hand. Come for 30 minutes. Or three hours. Bring a hand pruner. A lopper. A rake. A lawnmower. Whatever you have. Or just yourself. If you can’t labor, come offer words of encouragement or bottles of water. Honor the ancestors. Build community. Save a sacred space.
Photos by Lisa Y. Henderson, April 2022.
East Wilson’s new property owners often turned to Wilson Home and Loan Association, a savings and loan association affiliated with George D. Green, for short-term financing.
1922 Sanborn fire insurance map showing the Wellses’ house at 615 Viola and Viola’s narrow width.
By the late 1800s, the area of present-day Green Street east of the railroad tracks — largely farmland — was held by a handful of large landowners, notably George D. and Ella M. Green and Frank I. and Annie Finch. We’ve seen here how the Samuel H. and Annie Washington Vick sold parcels in the 600 block to their friends and family to solidify a middle-class residential district for African-Americans. The Vicks themselves bought fifteen acres from the Greens, which they later divided into the lots they sold to others.
These transactions disclose more early settlers on East Green:
Detail of T.M. Fowler’s 1908 bird’s eye map of Wilson. Green Street slices diagonally across the frame. Samuel H. and Annie Vick’s new multi-gabled mansion is at (1). The church he helped establish, Calvary Presbyterian, is at the corner of Green and Pender at (2). At (3), Pilgrim Rest Primitive Baptist Church, which bought its lot from the Vicks. At (4), the original location of Piney Grove Free Will Baptist Church.
Deed Book 19, page 340, Register of Deeds Office, Wilson.
In 1883, Parker Battle paid $171.30 to George D. and Ella M. Green for a one-eighth acre lot at Spring and Jones Streets adjacent to Harper Best.
Deed Book 81, page 323.
In 1893, Ellen Williams, J.H. Joyner, Joseph Short, Haywood Batts, Amos Whitley, William Barnes, George Barnes, Robert Barnes, Agatha Williams, Frank Barnes, James Williams, Doublin Barnes, Amerson Parker, George Gaston, Joshua Farmer, Louis Deans, Leah Bullock, Elbert Locust, John Marshaw, Richard Battle, William Pender, George Barnes Jr., and Proctor Battle “associate[d] themselves” to purchase land to establish an African-American cemetery just outside Elm City. The group bought a two and a half acre parcel from Thomas G. Dixon and wife on 6 January 1893. As they began to sell burial plots, however, they ran into a problem. Securing the signatures of all the owners on every single sale was difficult and time-consuming.
After fifteen years of this struggle, on 28 September 1908, the owners conveyed the Elm City Colored Cemetery to three of their number — Robert Barnes, Haywood Batts, and George Barnes — as trustees.
On a March morning, a 360° look at Odd Fellows Cemetery. The old gated entrance. The Tate and Dawson family plots. The Foster family plot. The wilderness of Rountree Cemetery. Straddling the tree line, the Vick family plot. Wiley Oates‘ obelisk. The densest remaining uncleared section. Ben Mincey‘s fire hydrant and the Mincey family plot. The work we’ve done in Seasons 1 and 2. Vick Cemetery in the distance. The power lines. The backs of the Barnes markers in their family plot. The street and the old gate.