Technological miscues last night prevented me from reaching the question-and-answer portion of my LSP presentation, but I did manage to record my exposition on the history of the Lane Street Project cemeteries and the Project itself. Please send me any questions you have about our work, and I’ll answer promptly.
The Season 3 kick-off clean-up is Saturday, January 14, and we hope to see you there!
Honor Dr. King and the ancestors! We need your hands, your heart, or both Saturday morning as we return to Odd Fellows Cemetery for Season 3 of our clean-up! All are welcome — there’s work for every ability!
I understand that poking around in cemeteries is not for everyone. Might I interest you, then, in a creek cleanup?
This is Sandy Creek. Yesterday, just past Rountree Cemetery, I shepherded a snapping turtle from the middle of street to the curb, then watched it tip itself headlong into this filth. Like the other waterways of East Wilson — branches of Hominy Swamp and Toisnot Swamp — the pollution in Sandy Creek is atrocious. That any animal, much less one as large and ancient as a dinner-plate-sized turtle, is able to survive in this soup is a miracle, but does life need to be so hard?
Many thanks to George Edward Freeney Jr. for use of this photograph of Odd Fellows Cemetery.
A small, but efficient, crew showed up for today’s cleanup at Odd Fellows, and we continued to make deep inroads into the tangle of privet and wisteria that enshroud the cemetery’s midsection.
To accommodate May holidays, Season 2’s final cleanup days are May 14 and 21. Please join us!
Beta Beta Beta Chapter of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity was again there strong! Samuel H. Vick was a founding member of the chapter. I challenge other fraternities and fraternal organizations to match the Ques’ commitment to community service!
It was a beautiful day for making a difference.
The Senior Force cleared out the pile I discovered in January 2020 and featured in a recent post.
Briggs Sherwood and Castonoble Hooks work to pull wisteria from a gum tree it is smothering.
The terrible beauty of wisteria.
Photographs by Lisa Y. Henderson, April 2022.
We have, at most, three more organized Season 2 cleanups at Odd Fellows Cemetery — April 23, May 14, and May 21. The heat and fecundity of summer, as well as the hazardous insect and reptile life, make working in the woods more difficult than we can comfortably invite volunteers to do. For these reasons, it is critical that we maximize our time and effort in the coming weeks.
Here’s Odd Fellows on a recent April morning. The Senior Force has been putting in extra work every week and, for the first time in decades, a fifty-foot swath inside the tree line has been cleared.
In February 2020, almost a year before Lane Street Project began, I discovered a pile of headstones well back in the woods, evidence of some misguided earlier cleanup. The pile was nestled just behind an immense thicket of privet and wisteria and could only be reached by circuitous approach. This past February, I expressed hope to Castonoble Hooks that we would be able to break through the thicket and open a direct path to the headstones.
The Senior Force did it.
Circled below, Bessie McGowan‘s headstone at the edge of the pile that includes my great-grandmother Rachel Barnes Taylor‘s. The Senior Force, anchored by brothers Cass and Will Hooks, Briggs Sherwood, and Glenn Wright, demolished a seemingly impenetrable hedge to expose the interior of Odd Fellows cemetery.
Here are Bessie McGowan’s marker and the Jurassic forest that has sprung to life behind it in the last month. Everything green you see is wisteria, an invasive vine that has largely choked off native plant species.
In January, I placed Rachel Taylor’s headstone upright against a stump.
Here it is yesterday. This is what we’re up against, folks, and we can’t do it without you.
Saturday’s going to be beautiful. Please lend a hand. Come for 30 minutes. Or three hours. Bring a hand pruner. A lopper. A rake. A lawnmower. Whatever you have. Or just yourself. If you can’t labor, come offer words of encouragement or bottles of water. Honor the ancestors. Build community. Save a sacred space.
Photos by Lisa Y. Henderson, April 2022.
It’s the season in which Odd Fellows Cemetery’s principal scourge is at its most charming, dripping shimmery lavender racemes. In two seasons, though, Lane Street Project volunteers have flushed the wisteria from the treetops, and its showy flowers now appear only at the edges of the woods.
Removal of a few decades of leaf litter has exposed the dense lattice of wisteria that scores the forest floor above and below ground.
Now that the canopy’s been cleared, increased sunlight is spurring the rampant growth of young wisteria shoots.
Toward the back of Odd Fellows, thick ropes of wisteria continue to strangle trees.
Please consider joining us for a cemetery cleanup. The next two are scheduled for April 9 and 23. Thank you!
