Stones and bones: Volunteers help resurrect local African-American history (NC)
Will cross post to African American and North Carolina groups.
Since genealogy and the restoration of old cemeteries are keen interests of mine, I was especially interested by this article. A friend of mine has also been involved in the documentation of the old Timbuctoo African-American Cemetery in Rancocas, NJ. See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/02/AR2010080205217.html
Mountain XPress
Asheville, NC
Stones and bones: Volunteers help resurrect local African-American history
Posted on September 2, 2014
by Jake Frankel
A normally quiet corner of Asheville’s Kenilworth neighborhood has been humming in recent weeks as volunteers wield weed whackers and hammers. Their work is part of the latest effort to rescue Western North Carolina’s oldest known African-American cemetery from the ravages of neglect and obscurity.
Between at least the mid-1800s and 1943, nearly 2,000 human bodies were crammed into the 2-acre patch of land at the end of Dalton Street, adjacent to the St. John “A” Baptist Church. Most of the graves are unmarked; many contain the last remains of slaves and other black citizens whose lives and contributions to the community have been largely unrecognized.
In the decades since its final burial, the cemetery fell victim to the relentless spread of poison ivy, kudzu and briars. George Gibson, who helped bury bodies there as a boy, says that when he revisited the site in 1986, he was disturbed to see it “in a shamble” and vowed “to get it back to how I had seen it: A clean cemetery.”
It began as a one-man mission: “I came out there with just a hedge clipper, a pair of loppers,” he recalls. Gibson was soon joined by his friend George Taylor, who also grew up nearby. But the property was too far gone by then for two pairs of hands to be able to save it, and though groups of volunteers have since intermittently gotten involved, the results have been mixed. Several times they’ve beaten back the weeds, only to see them reclaim the site soon after (see “If Stones Could Talk,” Sept. 23, 1998, Xpress)....
MORE at https://mountainx.com/living/stones-and-bones-volunteers-help-resurrect-local-african-american-history/
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