GIS

Lane Street Project: inspiration out of Athens, Georgia.

If Lane Street Project had an inspo board, these images would be tacked across the top. 

I drove over to Athens yesterday to listen to UGA students talk about their semester’s work storymapping the families of historic Brooklyn Cemetery.

Linda Davis founded Friends of Brooklyn Cemetery in 2006. She’s part of the descendant community, and I look forward to speaking with her soon and tapping into her wisdom and wealth of experience.

I tried to visit the cemetery before the talk started, but it’s accessed from the parking lot of a church, and I didn’t know where the gates were or what the rules were around visitation. There are several cemeteries I want to visit in the Athens area, so I’ll see it next trip. 

I sat on the front row near the students, and I overheard several of them mention “my family.” I was briefly thrown as all but two of a dozen or so were white (just one is Black), and Brooklyn is an African-American cemetery. As they presented, however, it became clear that the students identify very closely with the particular families they were assigned to research. 

Each StoryMap used the same design layout. For each family, researchers included an introduction, a family tree, a map tour of the gravesites, a timeline and map tour of addresses significant to the family’s history, and a spotlight on one family member.

For example:

Project members acknowledged some of the limitations of their research.

(And a nod to Lyndon House Arts Center, which hosts sponsor Historic Athens’ monthly programming.)

Odd Fellows, Vick, and Rountree Cemeteries don’t have a major research university in their backyard, but East Carolina and North Carolina State Universities aren’t far away. Odd Fellows is perfect for this kind of storymapping project, and I am exploring ways to make it happen. (Including maybe taking an intro GIS course myself.) 

See more of Community Mapping Lab’s work in and around Athens, including the Brooklyn Cemetery, here.

Additional evidence of Rosenwald school sites.

I went down a whole rabbit hole today at North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office’s HPOWEB 2.0 GIS mapping tool. Inching my cursor across Wilson County, I found locations (or approximate locations) for several Rosenwald schools I’ve only been able to guess at.

This location, labeled “approximate,” places Barnes School a little further south on Airport Boulevard than my guesstimate.

As identified by former students and confirmed by deed, Barnes School was here:

 

  • Williamson School

As I’d believed, the original two-teacher Williamson School was on the premises of Williamson High School, built in 1941. [Update: this is incorrect. Williamson School was on present-day Willing Worker Road.]

  • Lucama School

Confirmation that Lucama School was adjacent to First Baptist Church of Lucama.

  • Kirby’s Crossing School

Earlier sources indicated two possible sites for Kirby. The information below places the school adjacent to Saint Delight Free Will Baptist.

The pin dropped to mark Saint Delight is misplaced below. The church actually is further north, visible at the right edge of the oval I added to represent the approximate location of Kirby’s School.

[UPDATE: actually, the school was on the other side of the church in a area now wooded.]

  • Ferrell’s School

I only knew Ferrell’s was somewhere near Black Creek. In fact, it was a couple of miles southwest, on Perry Road, which runs roughly parallel to present-day I-795 and US 117.

  • Evansdale School

I knew Evansdale School was on or near the railroad south of the crossroads that marked Evansdale community proper. This information places it on the far side of the tracks paralleling Graves Road, about halfway toward Grimsley Store Road. The school’s lot description mentions a “corner of Church lot,” which was likely Jackson Chapel A.M.E. Zion Church.

  • Jones Hill School

I had assumed that Jones Hill School was adjacent to Jones Hill Primitive Baptist Church, but, per this information, it was located a little further west on Old Raleigh Road. In fact, it “stood in what is now [right-of-way]; Old Raleigh Rd. was moved slightly to the N[orth.]”

Aerial images via Google Maps.

Another look at the location of Oakdale, the “colored cemetery.”

As noted here, I have long been intrigued by the disappearance (in space and memory) of Wilson’s first African-American cemetery, sometimes called Oaklawn or Oakland or Oakdale. The precise location of the first city-owned black cemetery is a mystery, though most people believe (and as I conjectured here) it was above Cemetery Street where Whitfield Homes are now situated.

No official records related to the cemetery survive, and no plat map delineates its complete boundaries. However, I’ve found one reference to the “colored cemetery” on a 1923 plat map of “The D.C. Sugg Property Located on Stantonsburg Road and Lincoln Avenue.”  Using a 1937 aerial photograph of the area (the graves in the cemetery were disinterred in the early 1940s), plus the plat, I’ve come up with a revised location estimate.

Here’s the plat map, with modern street names noted and the area marked “Colored Cemetery” emphasized:

1-215 copy

Plat Book 1, page 215 (annotated), Register of Deeds Office, Wilson.

Wilson disinterred the (known) graves at Oakdale in 1941. Accordingly, I searched the 1937 aerial photograph of this area, below. The street at left is Railroad Street. Manchester Street is at far right, and parallel to it was then Stantonsburg Street. (North of Cemetery, it is now Pender Street. The lower section is now Black Creek Road.)The red-dashed lines mark current streets, including Pender, New, Nora, and Blount. The blue-dashed line is Nora St. as it appears on the 1923 plat map above. The green marks the borders of the colored cemetery above. (I have added a northern border though none is shown on the plat map.)

If my mark-up is correct, the cemetery (or, at least, its southern extension) was south of Cemetery Street near the site now occupied by Daniels Learning Center (the former Elvie Street School.)

I ran the mark-up by Will Corbett, GIS Coordinator, Wilson County Technology Services Department, for an opinion on my conjecture. He agreed and returned this graphic:

Bingo. The blue-shaded area is the “colored cemetery” overlaid on a current map of the neighborhood. This image reveals that the cemetery covered what is now a row of houses fronting on New Street, as well nearly the entirety of the lawn and semi-circular driveway in front of Daniels/Elvie school.

Was this cemetery marked on Sanborn fire insurance maps? It is not on the 1922 map, the last one for which I have access.

The maps corresponding to the sections marked 25 and 29 show houses along Railroad, Suggs and Stantonsburg Streets, and a few along the north side of East Contentnea (now Cemetery) Street. However, south of East Contentnea, the space is blank but for subsection numbers 225 and 256, and no corresponding maps were made. Though it is not marked, Oakdale cemetery was located in this space.

With the information above, I revisited a plat map the city filed in 1942. I initially had difficulty interpreting “The Town of Wilson Property on Cemetery Street,” but I now see it is oriented south to north. Turn it upside down, and the outline of the old colored cemetery clearly emerges. As I suspected, the city had owned the section between present-day New and Cemetery Streets as well as the inverted L below New, and it is likely that there were also burials in this space.

Plat book 3, page 150, Register of Deeds Office, Wilson.

Lane Street Project: cemeteries in the flood plain.

From the website of the Wilson County GIS/Mapping Office, a map showing the flood plain of Sandy Creek. As is obvious from the drifts of trash littering the low-lying rear of Rountree cemetery, much of this graveyard is regularly underwater. The same holds for the southeast quadrant of Odd Fellows cemetery and nearly all of the section of Rountree across Lane Street.

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