African-American cemetery

African American Cemeteries and Their Communities: a symposium.

I’m excited to have been invited by the Durham Black Burial Grounds Collaboratory to African American Cemeteries and Their Communities to engage in conversation with “diverse stakeholders — descendants, reclamation organizations, and academics/researchers — to foster collaboration in the sensitive and vital work of preserving African American cemeteries and honoring the communities they represent.” I’m looking forward to sharing Lane Street Project’s story and bringing back practices and processes to benefit the cemeteries we serve.

Bravo, Iredell County Public Library!

Kudos to the Statesville, N.C., chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. for recognizing (and partnering with) Shellie Taylor, Joel Reese, and Iredell County Public Library for their exemplary work with Statesville’s Green Street Cemetery project. Further congrats to the library on its invitation to speak at the North Carolina Humanities Luncheon about library projects funded by N.C. Humanities, including the ground-penetrating radar at Green Street Cemetery! (There’s an idea!)

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.

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.