Juneteenth

Lane Street Project: Juneteenth 2023.

I’ve begun to build a database of names of people buried in one of the three Lane Street Project cemeteries — Rountree, Odd Fellows, and Vick. Of the 578 people identified so far, more than 80 were born enslaved. Their graves, overwhelmingly unmarked, deserve our special care and honor.

Lane Street Project invites you on June 17 to stop by our booth at Wilson Juneteenth Festival to chat with our volunteers and to pick up information about our work at Odd Fellows Cemetery and the latest developments at Vick Cemetery.

On June 19, Scarborough House Resort is sponsoring a clean-up workday at Odd Fellows. What better way to celebrate Juneteenth than helping clear the gravesites of those who greeted freedom in 1865?

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Wilson Juneteenth Festival takes place at Whirligig Park, 301 Goldsboro Street South, Wilson. Interested in helping at our tent? Contact me at lanestreetproject@gmail.com.

Odd Fellows Cemetery is at 2100 Bishop L.N. Forbes Street, Wilson. Please wear long pants, boots, and insect repellant. This will be our last big workday before Season 4 next winter. Thank you, Jen Kehrer and Scarborough House!

Lane Street Project: help wanted!

Lane Street Project has an opportunity to set up a booth at Wilson Juneteenth Festival to raise awareness of our work and the cemeteries we serve. This is an excellent chance to connect with the community, especially families who might be descended from or related to people buried in Vick Cemetery.

We have less than three weeks to pull this together. The festival is June 17th and runs from 2:00 P.M.-9:00 P.M. We need more volunteers who will commit to manning our booth during the day. We’ll be handing out informational literature about the clean-ups at Odd Fellows and about the recent findings at Vick Cemetery. If you’ve been wanting to help Lane Street Project, but dragging vines out of the woods isn’t your thing, please consider volunteering for an hour or two.

If interested, please contact me as soon as possible at blackwideawake@gmail.com or via the Lane Street Project Facebook page. Thank you!

Lane Street Project: Juneteenth.

This headstone may mark the burial of someone who lived and died in slavery. It stands in a small cemetery in western Wilson County known to have been established for enslaved people and situated adjacent to the cemetery of the slaveowning family.

Though every large slaveholding farm probably had one, I know the exact location of only one cemetery in Wilson County established prior to the Civil War to hold the remains of enslaved people. (Please speak up if you can lead me to more.) Rountree, Odd Fellows, and Vick Cemeteries were not so-called slave cemeteries, but many men and women buried within them were born enslaved.

I call the names of those we know:

Dave Barnes (1861-1913)

Della Hines Barnes (1858-1935)

Smith Bennett (1852-1920)

Mark H. Cotton (ca.1840-1934)

Lucy Hill Dawson (1860-1917)

Rev. Henry W. Farrior (1859-1937)

Prince Mincey (1841-1902)

Rev. John H. Scott (1857-1940)

Hardy Tate (1853-1938)

Rachel Barnes Taylor (1863-1927)

Daniel Vick (ca.1840-1908)

Fannie Blount Vick (ca.1842-1890s)

Samuel H. Vick (1861-1946)

 

Juneteenth.

For fifty or so years after the Civil War, Wilson’s African-American community celebrated Emancipation Day on January 1. The day marked the issuance in 1863 of the Emancipation Proclamation and was decidedly symbolic, as that executive order could not be enforced on behalf of most of North Carolina’s enslaved. Instead, they were freed, as a practical matter, only after the Confederacy surrendered at Appomattox Court House in April 1865.

In Texas, freedom did not arrive until June 19 of that year, when a Union Army commander read General Order No. 3 upon arrival in Galveston. African-American Texans have been celebrating Juneteenth since 1866, and, after slowly gaining traction across the country over the last few decades, the holiday is now widely observed. (This very day, in fact, it’s on the verge of becoming a national holiday, which feels performative, if not downright gaslight-y, given where this country is on any and every substantive thing around Black history.)

Juneteenth is a new celebration in Wilson, but it picks up where an old one left off, and I love to see it. Starting June 18, The Spot, an after-school youth center in what was once the New Grabneck neighborhood, is presenting Walk In Their Shoes — “this project will reimagine our existing walking trail into an immersive storytelling experience. Students and families can attend during open walking times and use technology to hear real stories from real people in our community. Around the trail art installments created by SPOT students will give a visual insight to the story and bring it to life.”

On June 26, Mount Hebron Masonic Lodge No. 42 — chartered in Wilson in 1881 — is throwing a party in the iconic 500 block of East Nash Street featuring food, music, art, and dollops of history throughout. (Can you identify the five titans of East Wilson depicted at the top of their flyer?)