The City has updated the City Projects page of its website to include its spend plan for Vick Cemetery. At the end of the short list provided to me by the Mayor, there’s an additional item:
Rather than with robust, proactive engagement, this is how transparency and accountability show up for Vick Cemetery. One-way and passive.
As always, we press on.
The Times‘ September 26 coverage of the City’s spend plan for Vick Cemetery reveals that the erosion abatement has already begun (and will be paid for out of the City’s stormwater budget.) No additional details regarding plans to “research diverting drainage” near the parking lot. Keep your eyes open, folks.
Wilson Times, 26 September 2025.
A moment to thank Wilson Times for its continuing coverage of Lane Street Project cemeteries. A Times reporter was onsite when Samuel H. Vick’s headstone was uncovered in 2020, and the paper has reported extensively on every major development since. The Times recently took home 11 awards at North Carolina Press Awards’ annual banquet. Congratulations! Support local media!
After last week’s city council meeting, Mayor Carlton Stevens advised LSP Senior Force Leader Castonoble Hooks that a proposal for spending money allotted for Vick Cemetery would be available Monday. I immediately requested a copy.
On Tuesday, Mayor Stevens emailed me the city’s plan. For transparency, I am sharing the City’s plan. The Mayor’s words are in blue bold below. My thoughts, which largely track my emailed response to mayor and council but include extra editorializing), are in red.
In addition, the council has allocated $5,000 for the development and erection of a sign for Vick Cemetery. That is something that we should sit down and discuss in the near future to get that ball rolling. Council actually approved this circa 2021, and it’s fantastic news that they will finally move to effectuate it. Interpretive signage will tell Vick Cemetery’s story and explain its significance in Wilson’s history.
While I am thrilled that Vick Cemetery will be receiving this attention, I reiterate those suggestions (not hereby addressed) set forth in my September 2 letter. I am grateful for this beginning and look forward to continuing dialogue.
I want to reiterate this last paragraph. The City’s plan does not address a number of critical demands. Among other things, there is still no proactive engagement with the descendant community. There’s no mention of investigations into the handling of Vick’s headstones or the placement of electric utility poles in the cemetery. And, most glaringly, there is no commitment to additional GPR-surveying of the public right-of-way (and other unsurveyed strips of land) to identify the location of graves, which was among New South’s recommendations. The demands, arguably, lie outside the scope of a spend plan for capital improvements. Nevertheless, they remain on the table for the continued care of this sacred space.
What are your thoughts on the City’s plans for spending the $50,000 allocated for improvements to Vick?
A week ago today, I sent a letter to the mayor, city manager, and city council members concerning Vick Cemetery’s future. Lamentably, but par for the course, none of the nine responded with so much as an acknowledgment of receipt.
In the absence of responses, we have only the comments of Rebecca Agner, the City’s spokesperson, as reported in the August 29 Wilson Times. Let’s parse them.
Immediately, my heart sinks: “Public works will complete plans and begin addressing the issue soon.” With all due respect to the fine men and women of Wilson’s public works department, turning to public works as a first step is how we got where we are. Public works came up with the plan back in the ’90s to level Vick Cemetery and remove its headstones. Addressing the erosion issue is not solely a drainage ditch problem, and I invite correction if I’m wrong, but I feel confident in stating that nobody in public works, then or now, has any expertise in cemetery preservation.
Bullet point 5 of my September 2 letter requested “Consultation with archaeologists or other experts on the most appropriate way to halt erosion of Vick Cemetery exacerbated by the intensive defoliation of the ditch at its edge and, more generally, commitment to engaging with qualified professionals with experience related to cemeteries and cemetery preservation, including but not limited to archaeologists, historic preservationists, geophysicists, and government agencies, such as the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology. The issues at Vick Cemetery cannot be redressed with lawn maintenance or road maintenance solutions. But here we are, with the City once again placing responsibility for resolving this pressing issue in the hands of people who, while excellent at all that is within their wheelhouse, are not trained to devise plans for cemetery preservation and to ensure compliance with pertinent laws and regulations. (We have not talked about the application of a scorched-earth strength directly into a drainage ditch, a highly regulated activity that is generally proscribed or requires special permits.)
It is understandable if you read this to mean that the City’s delay in spending the $50,000 was because they’re been “working with state official” for two years to reallocate the funding to Vick and only now are able to begin “developing a scope of work for the recommendations.” If that’s what you understood, however, you are mistaken.
This Times clipping is an excerpt from my blog post on 24 September 2023:
Three days earlier, I had raised questions about why the state budget had included “$50,000 to the City of Wilson for capital improvements or equipment at the Herring-Ellis Cemetery.” (Herring-Ellis is an African-American family cemetery on Forest Hills Road that that benefitted from a one-time clean-up by students led by former state legislator Ken Fontenot.) As we see above, Mayor Carlton Stevens immediately recognized the problem with using state money to clean up one private cemetery, and Fontenot quickly pivoted, claiming that he meant to include Vick all along. Bottom line, Wilson has had (or known it was getting) this money, properly allocated to Vick, for nigh on two years. Only now, though, after a Lane Street Project volunteer raises the alarm about erosion, has it started shuffling its feet to think about solutions.
Note carefully that Agner makes no mention of engaging the descendant community in a discussion of what to do at Vick. No mention of consulting subject-matter experts. As ever — do they never learn? — decisions about Vick will be made behind closed doors by people with no people in this ground. These decisions will then be presented fait accompli to people whose foremothers and forefathers’ graves lie, best case, under a featureless expanse of lawn, but may be under a parking pad or walkway or pierced by a utility pole or the anchor of a guy wire.
Demand better, Wilson. Demand more. Starting with transparency and accountability.
Ask hard questions. Is the City going to ignore the dead buried in what we now consider public right-of-way? Where are the headstones? Who allowed the power poles? Will the poles and the guy wires remain? Will a full survey map be filed in the office of Register of Deeds? Why not?
WE REMEMBER VICK CEMETERY.
The letter I wrote to the Mayor, City Manager, and City Council Members in the wake of last week’s “false” alarm (as to bones, not erosion) at Vick Cemetery:
I first raised question about Vick more than five years ago. While some progress has been made with its general maintenance, for two years the City has completely ignored the myriad issues that remain. I urge everyone who cares about Vick Cemetery to contact city leaders directly to express their concerns. Carping on Facebook feels good, but doesn’t reach the right eyes or ears.
If you are new to this issue, please reach out to me at blackwideawake@gmail.com, and I’d be happy to answer any questions you have. Thank you.
Have our worst fears come true?
A profound thank you to Castonoble Hooks for sounding the alarm about worsening erosion at Vick Cemetery; to Olivia Neeley and Drew Wilson of the Wilson Times, whose immediate investigation spotted what may be bones in the ditch; and the Wilson city and county officials who quickly reported to the scene today.
If these dry bones are human, whether recent or ancestral, we honor the memory of the deceased and commit ourselves to ensuring a more peaceful rest for this person and all who lie in Vick Cemetery.
——
Mercifully, the bones are not human. Nonetheless, we urge the City to take steps to address the erosion issue at Vick Cemetery, starting with additional ground-penetrating radar of the public right-of-way. Human bones have been found in these ditches before. We can forestall more.
Two years ago, I posted video of Vick Cemetery after a heavy rain, water rushing across the cemetery’s surface into the roadside culvert. Then-new wooden plugs showed the perilous proximity of graves to the edge of the ditch. Eight months ago, I wrote about erosion of the road itself. The situation has not gotten better.
Prior to Lane Street Project’s demands for better care of Vick, the ditch was regularly allowed to become choked with weeds and sweetgum saplings. (Such as what you can now see along Odd Fellows and Rountree Cemeteries.) As the ditch lies within the public right-of-way (indeed, the ditch exists because of the city’s decision to leave open culverts along this stretch of Bishop L.N. Forbes Street), the city is responsible for its maintenance.
In late 2022 or early 2023, either the Cemetery Commission or the Public Works Department treated the ditch alongside Vick Cemetery with a hardcore defoliant, which killed every shred of vegetation and created a moonscape-like strip of land . Unfortunately, no erosion control followed and, predictably, the cemetery’s edge is further slipping away.
Senior Force member Castonoble Hooks took this photo yesterday when he and a helper were mowing Odd Fellows.
I urge you to appeal to City Council to address this situation before even more damage is done to Vick Cemetery. The ditch, the road, the driveway, the driveway marker, and the power poles have done enough.
Once you see them, you can’t not see them. A burial alters soil density and, especially in the era of wooden caskets, chemistry. More than six decades after the last burials at Vick Cemetery, and despite the complete resculpting of the ground’s surface when the cemetery was cleared and graded in the 1990s, hundreds of graves still reveal themselves as rectangular areas of grass growing thicker and greener than the surrounding groundcover.
Photos by Lisa Y. Henderson, May 2025.
Tracking burials in Wilson’s African-American cemeteries is complicated by the imprecise names listed on death certificates as place of burial.
As a refresher, here’s a rough timeline of Black cemeteries operating in the city of Wilson in the 19th and 20th centuries:
Until about 30 years ago, Rountree, Odd Fellows, and Vick Cemeteries were locally known collectively as “Rountree Cemetery.” When the City of Wilson erected granite pillars at the entrance to its parking lot in the late 1990s, they were inaccurately engraved “Rountree-Vick Cemetery.” I was a few years into Black Wide-Awake before I completely understood that the three cemeteries are separate entities.
I’ve been building a database of known and likely burials in R/OF/V, based on death certificates, headstones, obituaries, and a few family stories. The death certificates detailed below show why the task is so complicated. Tentative assignments, if I can guess at all, are based on context clues like church membership, fraternal affiliation, locations of burials of close family members, and location of residence.
The Town of Wilson began requiring death certificates in 1909; the county not until 1914. Enforcement was irregular for the first few years after the mandate. Green Mercer’s death certificate cites his place of burial as “Wilson N.C. Colored Cemetery,” which, in 1910, could have been Oakdale or Masonic or Rountree or Odd Fellows, but was probably Oakdale.
Undertaker C.H. Darden most often broadly designated place of burial as “Wilson” or “Wilson, N.C.” Bruce Adams, who died in 1914, could have been buried in Oakdale, Rountree, Vick, or Masonic Cemeteries.
This unnamed infant, who died in 1918, was buried in “Wilson Cemetery,” which likely was the cemetery we now know as Vick.
Robert Hardy, who also died in 1918, was buried in “Roundtrees Church” cemetery. Taken at face value, he was buried in the cemetery owned by Rountree Missionary Baptist Church.
Wesley Barnes’ 1919 death certificate cites “Wilson Co[unty] NC.” Barnes was my great-grandmother’s brother. Though it’s possible he was buried in the county, Wes Barnes lived in town and probably was buried in Vick Cemetery.
His death certificate simply cites “Wilson, N.C.,” but Buster Ellis‘ headstone has been found with those of his grandmother and other family members in Rountree Cemetery.
Undertaker Columbus E. Artis of Artis & Flanagan generically marked Noah Tate as buried in Wilson, though he interred him in the Tate family plot in Odd Fellows Cemetery.
On the other hand, the headstone of James Edward Humphrey, engraved “Ed Humphrey,” whose death certificate also states “Wilson, N.C.,” stands in Odd Fellows Cemetery.
George Rountree’s death certificate bears the unusual designation “Rountree Potters field.” Presumably Vick, as a public cemetery, had a potter’s field, and that’s probably where Rountree was buried.
Bessie Baldwin’s death certificate says she was buried in Rest Haven, but her obituary says Rountree Cemetery. Her funeral was held at Rountree church. If she were a member, she likely was buried there.
Wilson Daily Times, 8 December 1944.
Dempsey Lassiter’s 1946 death certificate states that he was buried in Rountree Cemetery, as does his newspaper obituary. However, his headstone is standing in Odd Fellows Cemetery.
Burials attributed to “Rountree Cemetery” dropped off sharply after 1950.
Where, in fact, what Annie Teachey Coley buried? Rountree? Odd Fellows? Vick? The 1954 aerial view of the sites shows all were fairly open well into the decade
Carolyn Evans’ burial in 1960 was among the last in Rountree/Odd Fellows/Vick Cemeteries. The 1964 aerial view of the cemeteries shows clear abandonment.
