abandoned cemetery

A detour to Tarboro’s Saint Paul’s cemetery.

On an earlier research trip over to the Edgecombe County Courthouse in Tarboro, I happened upon Saint Luke Episcopal’s small cemetery on the edge of town. Today, I was more deliberate in my search for a cemetery that, until fairly recently, contained rare wooden grave markers:

After a little backing and forthing along West Wilson Street, I found Saint Paul A.M.E. Zion’s cemetery. (It is not adjacent to the church, which was destroyed in flooding in 1999 and rebuilt up the road.) Not to put too fine a point on it, the cemetery is in terrible shape. Though I know of no direct links to Wilson County for anyone buried there, y’all know how I feel about these spaces, and I stepped out to look around and pay respects.

The cemetery was founded in 1892. I did not find any wooden markers, but a number of fine century-plus year-old headstones still stand, including a beautiful marker for Odd Fellow P.L. Baskerville (the detail in that broken rose!); one for Louise Cherry Cheatham, first wife of United States Congressman Henry P. Cheatham; Viola Smith’s pristine anchor-and-ivy; and a fantastically engraved cement Hall family marker.

Add Saint Paul’s to the list of critically endangered historic African-American cemeteries in eastern North Carolina. If anyone is aware of efforts to reclaim it, please let me know.

Preston (or Presley) Lewis Baskerville was a Republican party stalwart, who, like Samuel H. Vick, enjoyed Congressman George H. White‘s patronage. His work as a painter and decorator earned him a feature in A.B. Caldwell’s History of the American Negro and His Institutions, North Carolina Edition (1921). (Alongside Wilsonians like Vick, Dr. William A. Mitchner, Rev. A.L.E. Weeks, D.C. Suggs, and others.)

That stylized tree? Fern? In cement. My mind is unceasingly blown by the artistry of hand-cut/curved/poured grave markers.

Viola Smith’s headstone is a fine example of this style.

Yuccas, traditional plant grave markers.

Photo of wooden marker courtesy of Knight and Auld, African American Heritage Guide: Tarboro, Rocky Mount, Edgecombe County (2013); other photos by Lisa Y. Henderson, December 2023.

Podcast recommendation: Sugar Land.

An impassioned, but disrespected, community advocate; an abandoned cemetery filled with unmarked graves of African-Americans; historic racism; frustratingly opaque government response.

There’s nothing new under the sun.

“In 2018, construction crews building a new school in Sugar Land, Texas, discovered a long-forgotten cemetery containing 95 graves. Two years ago, we set out to tell the story of these 95 people – who were they? What happened to them? In the process, we learned that theirs is a story about power – who gets it and how they wield it.”

Sound familiar?

Listen to and follow Sugar Land on NPR or wherever you get your podcasts.

Lane Street Project: the Gilbert Memorial Cemetery.

As noted here, there is no end to the number of desecrated African-American cemeteries across this country. Ten or so years ago, I posted to my Tumblr account (scuffalong.tumblr.com, if you’re interested) a photo I took in a bizarre “cemetery” not far from where I live in Atlanta, Georgia.

Yesterday, I stumbled on a recent YouTube short that explores Gilbert Memorial a little further. There are echoes of Vick Cemetery in what happened to Gilbert — the themes and trajectories of all these sacred spaces are depressingly familiar.

My thanks to Doug Loggins for sharing Gilbert’s story.

 

Lane Street Project: April clean-up schedule.

Finally — a warm community clean-up day!

Please come out to Odd Fellows Cemetery on April 10 and 24 and join your neighbors in the clean-up of three historic African-American cemeteries. All are welcome!

This month, we really need your help:

  • Pruning shrubs and limbing up hollies around the Vick Cemetery monument
  • Cutting wisteria stumps in Odd Fellows Cemetery close to the ground for later defoliation treatment
  • Clearing underbrush and removing trash
  • Recording GPS coordinates for each grave marker (email me at lanestreetproject@gmail.com if you’re interested in this task)

Please protect yourself on-site — masks required, boots and gloves strongly encouraged. 

As always, THANK YOU!

Lane Street Project: African-American cemeteries and cemetery projects.

Odd Fellows Cemetery, Wilson, N.C., January 2021.

It is impossible to list every African-American cemetery in the United States. Or even every abandoned African-American cemetery. Here, however, is the start of a running list of abandoned or abused African-American cemeteries whose particular circumstances have garnered media (or my) attention, and the organizations attempting to reclaim them. It takes its inspiration from the Adams-McEachin African American Burial Grounds Network Act, which proposes a voluntary national database of historic African-American burial grounds. This legislation would also establish a National Park Service program, in coordination with state, local, private, and non-profit groups, to educate the public and provide technical assistance for community members and public and private organizations to research, survey, identify, record, and preserve burial sites and cemeteries within the Network.

NORTH CAROLINA

  • Rountree, Odd Fellows and Vick Cemeteries, Lane Street Project, Wilson
  • Oakdale Cemetery, Wilson
  • South Asheville Cemetery, Asheville
  • Cemetery, Ayden
  • Black Bottom Memorial Cemetery, Belhaven
  • Cedar Grove Cemetery, Charlotte
  • Geer Cemetery, Friends of Geer, Durham
  • Oak Grove Cemetery, Elizabeth City
  • Elm City Colored Cemetery, Elm City
  • Greenleaf Cemetery, Goldsboro
  • Brown Hill and Cooper Field Cemeteries, Greenville
  • Bryan Cemetery, James City
  • Glades and McDowell Cemeteries, McDowell Cemetery Association, Marion
  • Greenwood Cemetery, New Bern
  • Oberlin Cemetery, Raleigh
  • Unity Cemetery, Rocky Mount
  • John N. Smith Cemetery, Cemetery Restoration Committee, Southport
  • Green Street/Union Grove Cemetery, Statesville
  • Maides Cemetery, Wilmington
  • Pine Forest Cemetery, Wilmington
  • Saint Phillips Moravian Second Graveyard, Winston-Salem

ALABAMA

ARKANSAS

  • Cherokee Cemetery, Huntington

FLORIDA

GEORGIA

ILLINOIS

KENTUCKY

  • African Cemetery #2, Lexington

MARYLAND

MICHIGAN

  • Detroit Memorial Park, Detroit

MISSISSIPPI

  • Old Lottville Cemetery, Farmhaven
  • Saint Luke’s Cemetery, Meridian
  • Noble Cemetery, Yazoo County

NEW JERSEY

  • African Burying Ground, Bedminster
  • Johnson Cemetery, Camden

NEW YORK

  • Mount Zion Cemetery, Kingston
  • African Burial Ground, Manhattan

PENNSYLVANIA

SOUTH CAROLINA

  • Douglas Cemetery, Columbia
  • Randolph Cemetery, Columbia
  • Silver Bluff Cemetery, Jackson
  • Old Soapstone Cemetery, “Little Liberia,” Pumpkintown

TENNESSEE

  • Beck Knob Cemetery, Chattanooga

TEXAS

VIRGINIA

WASHINGTON, D.C.

  • Columbian Harmony Cemetery
  • Mount Zion and Female Union Band Society Cemetery

WEST VIRGINIA

  • Anderson Cemetery, Glen Allen

“You got to know where you and how you got to where you are.” — Charles White, local historian, Buckingham County, Virginia

Lane Street Project: “There is no question … the city owns it.”

Thirty-one years ago this month, the City of Wilson acknowledged what a quick deed search could have told anyone — it owns Vick cemetery.

Wilson Daily Times, 13 February 1990.

The Cemetery Commission’s reaction, as reported here, was a long list of negatives focused on the expense of restoration and upkeep of Vick cemetery, with no comment recorded about duties owed (and neglected for decades) to the dead. 

(N.B.: The Cemetery Commission is not involved in the present upkeep of Vick Cemetery or the narrow strip at the front of Odd Fellows Cemetery. They are mowed, sprayed, etc., by a contractor per an agreement with the City.)

Lane Street Project: goals, no. 1.

Richmond, Virginia’s Friends of East End Cemetery is out here doing the Lord’s work. Their journey is both inspiration and cautionary tale for the Lane Street Project.

For example:

The City of Wilson denied Vick Cemetery, then destroyed it. Rountree and Odd Fellows cemeteries have been neglected by their respective owners for more than half a century. The evidence of well-meaning, but illy executed, attempts to bring order to abandonment are strewn across the forest floor of those burial grounds — stacks of toppled grave markers, footstones bereft of headstones, piles of worn and broken marble.

To paraphrase a common folk-truth, these cemeteries can do bad all by themselves. The aim of Lane Street Project is to reclaim and restore, not to do further damage. Thus, until money and expertise are secured, clean up will be limited to loppers and pruners and trash bags. I’m shooting for a December or January date. Please stay tuned. 

Dr. Judy Rashid recently left flowers in memory of her infant sister, who was buried in Rountree or Vick Cemetery in 1949.

Lane Street Project: historic cemetery registration.

Last week, I registered Rountree, Odd Fellows, Vick, and Oakdale Cemeteries as historic cemeteries with North Carolina’s Office of State Archaeology, Division of Archives and History. Registration does not offer protection per se, but does guarantee their placement on state maps of sites of archaeological interest.

As an example, the form for Vick Cemetery:

The map showing state archaelogical sites is not yet available on-line. 

Lane Street Project: in context.

Apropos of Rountree, Odd Fellows and Vick cemeteries, please see this article in National Geographic magazine on growing efforts to preserve African-American burial sites, including proposed legislation to establish within the National Park Service the African American Burial Grounds Network.

 

Lane Street Project: aerial views.

A refresher:

  • The eastern end of Lane Street, in southeast Wilson, is home to three historic African-American cemeteries: Rountree (established about 1906), Odd Fellows (established circa 1900), and Vick (established 1913).
  • Rountree and Odd Fellows are privately owned. Vick is owned by the City of Wilson.
  • All three have been abandoned.
  • Rountree is completely overgrown with mature trees and heavy underbrush.
  • Odd Fellows is also overgrown, except for a narrow strip along the road that the city maintains.
  • In 1996, the city clear-cut Vick cemetery, removed its remaining headstones, graded the entire parcel, and erected a single marker in memory of the dead.

A series of aerial photographs of the cemeteries over time shows in astonishing detail the forgotten features of these cemeteries and the terrible march of neglect across all three. Each photograph has been overlaid with the present-day boundaries of tax parcels. The rectangle at left is Vick, then Odd Fellows and Rountree.

  • 1937

This blurry photograph shows the interconnectedness of the three cemeteries, with narrow dirt paths winding across property lines and no visible boundary markers. The light areas are too large to be individual stones and more likely are family plots of varying sizes. The back edge of Rountree and Odd Fellows cemeteries — marshy land along Sandy Creek — was wooded.

  • 1948

Though hundreds were buried between 1937 and 1948, Vick is still almost completely open field, with some trees at its western and southern edges and numerous plots visible.  A large cleared trapezoid straddles the Vick and Odd Fellows boundaries — what is this?

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  • 1954

Six years later, the change is shocking. Vick has clearly fallen into disuse, its paths allowed to fill with weeds. Rountree and Odd Fellows, too, are overgrown, but their major paths remain clear. The mystery trapezoid, however, is gone.

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  • 1964

Another ten years and all three cemeteries are well on their way to complete abandonment. Only one path is clear, a new passage cut to join an old one in Odd Fellows.

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  • Today

A contemporary aerial view of the three cemeteries shows the empty expanse of Vick; its lone city-sponsored monument; the paved path leading from the monument to a small parking lot located at the boundary of Vick and Odd Fellows; the cleared bit of Odd Fellows; and the jungle that is Rountree. There is no trace of the trapezoid.

I am indebted to Will Corbett, GIS Coordinator, Wilson County Technology Services Department, for responding to my inquiry re the availability of Wilson County maps, answering a million questions, and providing these remarkable images.