power pole

Lane Street Project: the other power pole.

Back to the power poles.

We know four — three steel, one wooden — were punched into Vick Cemetery in 1997. Other than to respond to public records requests to say there are no records of the installation of these poles, the City has made no comment on this sacrilege. 

The desecration is not contained to Vick. From a pole at the edge of Vick’s parking lot, electrical lines swoop along the edge of Odd Fellows to a pole planted at the high point of Rountree Cemetery, a private, church-owned burial ground. 

We know that the City cleared Vick completely and placed a monument at its center the year before the power poles went in. We don’t know what condition Rountree was in in 1997, but it had been inactive for forty years or more and was likely seriously overgrown. Consider the photo below though. The City’s power pole is visible just left of top center. Twenty feet away, shown at the bottom of this image, is a cluster of concrete headstones. Most are broken — concrete was especially vulnerable to weather and the fire that was often used to clean graveyards — but ten year-old Buster Ellis‘ stands intact. The marker for his grandmother, Clarkie Atkinson Ellis, born enslaved, lies nearby. We have not identified the others. 

It is difficult to believe that this area was not cleared in preparation for the installation of the power pole and that this heap of markers — or Daniel and Lottie Marlow‘s standing tall just beyond them — was not visible. 

We demand an investigation into the circumstances that allowed the City of Wilson and/or Wilson Energy to install  power poles in African-American cemeteries.

The pole as seen from the eastern edge of Odd Fellows Cemetery. Its base is wrapped in wisteria vines.

Lane Street Project: response to the 18 August 2023 request re power poles.

Yesterday, I received responses to my July 23 and August 18 requests to the City of Wilson for public records concerning Vick Cemetery. Below is the response to the August 18 request, which concerned the power poles we recently deduced were placed in Vick Cemetery after the site had been cleared of headstones, graded, and adorned with a single monument.

As set forth in the letter below beginning at the third paragraph, the City has not located any documents related to the planning and installation of power poles in Vick and Rountree Cemeteries. Its sole responsive documents are references to data and maps found in the GPR report or at the City of Wilson’s GIS website. It provided screenshots of those images, which I have excerpted below. Bottom line: the poles were manufactured in 1997, which confirms they were installed no earlier than than year.

 

The red lines present power lines. The power poles are represented by blue dots. Date was provided for four steel poles, which are marked with blue rectangles. I have been way off with my estimates of their height. The first (closest to the substation) is 95 feet in height. The rest are 90 feet. If 90 to 95 feet is the height above ground (and not the length of the pole), the section of pole below ground is roughly 11 to 11.5 feet. In the middle of graves.

The poles were last inspected eight years ago and were found to be in good condition. What happens when they need to be replaced?

Lane Street Project: a closer look at these power poles.

Something about these power poles was vexing my spirit.

There is the terrible fact that they and their guy wires lie inside the boundaries of Vick Cemetery, but my suspicion was about something worse.

Back on July 13, I posted video of a morning walk in Vick Cemetery. At 2:23, I stop at power pole #4 and zoom in on a small plaque affixed to its side. “Ah!,” I exclaimed, “1997.”

“So, one year after the City did this [camera pans across the empty cemetery], it put in these poles, which undoubtedly replaced poles that were here previously.”

“Undoubtedly replaced poles that were here previously”? Did I overspeak?

Wilson Energy’s Substation No. 2 was constructed in the mid-1960s after Wilson got out of the electricity generation business and entered into an agreement with Carolina Power & Light to distribute CP&L’s electricity.

Utility poles line both sides of Bishop L.N. Forbes Street between Substation 2 and Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway. Those on the north side are smaller wooden poles, the ordinary kind that carry low- and medium-voltage electrical lines and telecommunication lines. On the south side — the cemetery side — the poles are much taller and thicker, are made of steel, and appear to be transmission, rather than distribution, lines. (I’m not an electrical engineer or lineman, and I welcome a more precise identification of the type of pole, but it’s a minor point in this discussion.)

I had assumed that both sets of poles on B.L.N.F. Street were erected around the same time as the substation.

I was wrong.

The dirty truth is that the City of Wilson installed the steel power poles after it cleared Vick Cemetery, when it incontrovertibly knew this was the site of a public graveyard.

I’ve shared a 1994 aerial photograph of Vick Cemetery, but its poor resolution did not allow a close examination of the landscape. However, a couple of weeks ago, I received United States Geologic Survey aerial images of Vick Cemetery taken in 1993 and 1998.

Vick Cemetery, March 1993.

The ’93 image is also pretty low-resolution, and I set it aside (figuratively speaking) to look at the 1998 shot. 1998 was fuzzy, too, but I immediately noticed a difference between the two images. 1998 is a mid-winter shot, taken in the morning as the elongated shadows of power poles stretched across what was then known as Lane Street. They’re a little faint, so I’ve added yellow lines below to parallel their paths.

Here’s a current Google Maps image of the site with the five poles clearly visible.

I went back to take a look at 1993. 1998 — power poles. 1993 — no power poles.

The City cleared Vick Cemetery in 1995 and erected the central monument in 1996. In 1997, knowing full well that Vick and Rountree were cemeteries, the City ran a power line through them, sinking one wooden and three steel poles into Vick and one steel pole into Rountree.

Sit with that a minute.

After desecrating Vick cemetery by removing its headstones and leveling its surface, the City turned around and rammed power poles and guy wires into its graves.

Twenty-six years ago.

From Wilson County GIS’ website, here’s an image showing property lines (in orange) superimposed over part of Vick Cemetery. The bases of the steel poles on the south side of the street are plainly outside the public right-of-way and inside Vick Cemetery, which we know is chockfull of graves.

Here’s an angle from the ground, shot in mid-July. The yellowish specks in the grass to the right are the tops of the markers New South Associates placed to show graves detected along the cemetery’s border. Clearly, they lie outside the power pole.
Here’s this area in the grid 9 of New South’s report’s Appendix A, thick with graves.
And this gruesome shot at the other end of cemetery. Surely, when these poles were placed, workers unearthed evidence of damaged graves.

 

A survey map of Vick would make clear the location of power poles inside Vick Cemetery’s boundaries. Is this why the City is refusing to produce one?

On August 16, I submitted this public records request for records related to the power poles running alongside Vick Cemetery:

I have not received a response.

Mayor, Council, City Manager, Wilson Energy — what is your response to this outrage? Who is accountable for this further — and ongoing — abuse of Vick Cemetery’s dead? What is the plan for righting this continuing wrong?

Lane Street Project: the power poles.

Yes, indeed. What you’re looking at is a long line of utility poles marching down Bishop L.N. Forbes (formerly, Lane) Street, well within the historic boundaries of Vick and Rountree Cemeteries. 

Three enormous poles pin down the edge of Vick Cemetery. I don’t know when the easement was granted for the lines, or when they were erected, but I can guarantee it was decades after the Lane Street cemeteries were established. 

The first pole below stands on the high ridge at the front of Rountree Cemetery. Its base is completely engulfed by at least a decade of woody growth. Not thirty feet away, under a canopy of honeysuckle and other vines, is a pile of broken headstones dating to the 1920s. Were they moved to make way for power poles?

Whose lines are these?

Photos by Lisa Y. Henderson, March 2022.