North Carolina is expecting wintry weather conditions Sunday, and black ice is a strong possibility Monday morning. In an abundance of caution, we are postponing Lane Street Project’s Clean-Up Kickoff. Please put February 12 on your calendar, and stay tuned for announcements about the rescheduled event. Thanks for your support, and stay safe and warm this weekend.
Wilson Times‘ Drew C. Wilson continues his close coverage of Lane Street Project’s important community work in this 9 January 2022 piece on past and upcoming activities. See the original article here for photographs of Odd Fellows Cemetery:
“Volunteers armed with loppers, pruners, rakes and elbow grease will return to African American cemeteries at 10 a.m. Monday, Jan. 17, as participants celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday with a day of service dedicated to finding and restoring Wilson gravesites.
“The Lane Street Project grew from historian Lisa Y. Henderson’s Black Wide Awake blog as she explored the history and current status of the Rountree, Odd Fellows and Vick cemeteries on the former Lane Street, now renamed Bishop L.N. Forbes Street.
“In December 2020, Henderson sought help from anyone willing to help clean the overgrown cemeteries.
“A large group of volunteers descended on the site for an informal cleanup on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend last year.
“‘Prior to December of 2020, Odd Fellows Cemetery was impenetrable,’ Henderson said. ‘You had to cut your way into the tree line. There was wisteria and greenbrier and honeysuckle and all manner of overgrowth. Within the four months that the Lane Street Project last year was actively cleaning up, it’s now open. You can see about halfway back into the cemetery.’
“Workers uncovered at least 30 headstones in the woods.
“‘We cleared the fence that separates Vick and Odd Fellows cemeteries. We hauled out dumpsters and dumpsters of debris, or clippings of fallen trees. It is a totally different place now,’ Henderson said. ‘If you have never been there, you might still think, ‘Wow, this still looks pretty crazy.’ But it’s really night and day. By the end of the cleanup season, we were able to get an application of the defoliant to help retard the growth of the wisteria, which is the main invasive species that has overtaken the cemetery.’
“Along the way, the workers were able to uncover Samuel Vick’s grave.
“‘Samuel Vick, who is the namesake of Sam Vick Elementary School, during his lifetime was a businessman, he was a politician, he was an educator, he was a church leader and he was a millionaire at one point,’ Henderson said. ‘He was the most politically influential African American in Wilson history until probably G.K. Butterfield Jr. Certainly in the first half of the 20th century, he was the most influential.’
“Henderson said volunteers’ participation through the winter months amazed her.
“‘Beyond the tangible impact, there was just the bringing together of so many groups across Wilson’s community,’ Henderson said. ‘It was multiracial, multiethnic, multi-generational, people of different faiths. People came from out of out of town. Everybody just came together to do some good. I think particularly on the heels of 2020, it was really a healing space.’
“Visit Henderson’s Black Wide Awake blog at https://afamwilsonnc.com for more information on this year’s cemetery cleanups.”
In Season One, our volunteer corps ripped out the unimpenetrable tangle that had impeded entry across Odd Fellow’s front tree line, cleared deadfall, and lopped vines to transform the cemetery’s appearance and accessibility.
Here’s what we want to tackle in Season Two.
Complete the clearing of the fence between Odd Fellows and Vick. Largely as a result of a single family’s attention, we were able to open up the fence line nearly halfway back. The growth here is largely privet and honeysuckle with stems of relatively small diameter. Loppers and hand pruners are good tools to use in this area, as well as hard-tined rakes to remove the clippings.
Reclaim the Mincey family plot. Benjamin Mincey was a famed early chief of Wilson’s all-Black Red Hot volunteer fire fighters, and his grave is fittingly marked with a hydrant. His son M. Ben Mincey toiled for decades, largely by himself, to clean Odd Fellows, and the clear area nearest the road is the legacy of his work. Last season, we cut back to the ground the large shrub that was leaning on the hydrant, but over the summer, it shot up suckers nearly five feet high. These need to be cut back to the ground (and treated with defoliant), and the young wisteria you see snaking around clipped. (While we’re looking — check out that clear view a hundred feet or more over into Vick Cemetery. That was impossible this time last year!)
Break the ankles on all this wisteria. Wisteria is the most detrimental invasive plant species in Odd Fellows. After you admire its jungly beauty, snip every single vine like this that you see — once at the ground and again as high as you can reach.
Clear the space around this pile of gravestones. I found my great-grandmother Rachel Barnes Taylor‘s marker in this pile in January 2021. There are at least twenty whole or broken stones here, piled up during unknown clean-ups decades past. Wisteria needs to be cut away from the area, the small saplings removed, and the soil probed carefully for more buried markers.
Remove deadfall. While we generally discourage chainsaw usage, a knowledgeable handler might be necessary to saw these dead pines into moveable chunks. Please be careful.
Stop baby wisteria in its tracks. An unintended consequence of ridding the tree canopy of wisteria was an increase in sunlight reaching the forest floor. By mid-summer, innumerable little wisteria shrublets had popped up, making access to the interior of the cemetery nearly impossible. Now that they’ve shed their leaves, they’re difficult to detect in this photo, but you’ll see them immediately. If we don’t clip these now, they’ll be wrapped around a tree by next season.
Physical labor is not the only type of work that supports Lane Street Project’s efforts to reclaim Odd Fellows. Please see here for ideas. We appreciate all the help we can get — there’s a role for everyone to play!
Photographs by Lisa Y. Henderson, December 2021.
Lane Street Project’s Season Two kicks off Monday, January 17 — Martin Luther King Jr. National Day of Service!
Here are links to helpful clean-up Q’s and A’s (they’re from Season One, but still basically applicable), and tomorrow I’ll post this season’s goals. A heartfelt “welcome back” to our Season One vets, and a “welcome aboard” to all who plan to come out for the first time!
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Look what popped up in my Facebook Memories today:
I’ll confess it, y’all. My expectations were pretty low. I’d issued hopeful calls like this before and had ended up poking around by myself for a frigid hour or two. Maybe, though, something about that first pandemic year
we’d just been through made this appeal just hit different.
A dozen people showed up. (Even from out of town.) And a newspaper reporter. And before you knew it, Sam Vick‘s headstone emerged from the soil like a benediction, and Lane Street Project moved from wishful thinking to purposeful action.
A year later, and Vick Cemetery is on its way to re-recognition as a public cemetery. Odd Fellows has backslid a bit toward wilderness, but you can actually get in it without a machete. Rountree — well, we’ll get there.
Most importantly, a beautiful, organic, multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-generational coalition of Wilsonians and friends came together, bringing tools and time and energy to the reclamation of these sacred spaces.
I’ve thanked you for this work, and I’ll thank you often and forever.
And in advance.
Lane Street Project Season 2 kicks off in January 2022 during Martin Luther King Jr. weekend. If you or your church or your civic organization or your children or your co-workers or your cousins are looking for a way to be of service, a way to make a difference, please join us. Many hands make light work.
The headstones of Della Hines Barnes and Dave Barnes, Odd Fellows Cemetery, September 2021.