Professor Charles Ewen looks at a map of grave plots at the African American cemetery on North Lee Street in Ayden.
Mallory Purser, Ewen, and Autumn Saski measure instrument height at the African American cemetery.
Ewen and his students have marked graves in the cemetery with pink, numbered flags.
Searching for answers in sacred spaces
ECU researchers moving ahead on with work to restore ancestral burial ground, revive stories of the past By Karen Eckert
Cemeteries are known to be quiet places, but the messages they send can be loud and clear. That’s the case with a large ancestral African American cemetery nestled out of sight in a wooded area on the east side of Old N.C. 11, on the town’s northern edge. Archaeologists and anthropologists are now studying those messages as part a community effort to restore the graveyard and document the stories of the 400 or more souls who were buried there since at least since the early 1900s. Once stalled by the pandemic, work has once again began in earnest and progress
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includes numbered flags on all the graves that project leaders are working to align with online documentation they hope will grow as the project moves forward. African Americans used the burial ground before the town established what is known today as the North East Cemetery, according to officials. Evidence suggests, the cemetery was in use for about 57 years as an active burial ground, according to Helen Dixon, an assistant professor in the East Carolina University Department of History. The oldest burial with a legible headstone has 1905 as the year of death, and the most recent burial with a legible headstone has 1962, according
to Dixon. Those dates are based on the graves with markers, according to Charles Ewen, an archaeologist in the ECU Department of Anthropology. “There are three times as many unmarked graves,” he said. Ewen and Dixon are part of a five-member team of researchers who began studying the cemetery after community members asked the town to make improvements. Looking Back Annie Edwards, a lifelong resident, has relatives buried in the cemetery, which had over the years become overgrown and fallen into disrepair. She is happy that, at long last,
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the burial ground is getting some much-needed attention. “I love it,” said Edwards, who is among townspeople who played a role in making that happen. She said that for more than a decade she has been inquiring about how she and others in the African American community could gain access to the cemetery for the purpose of taking care of it. At one point she was told that permission was needed, she said. For years she was referred to one person after another, she said, but no one seemed to know who owned the property or who was responsible for it, and she was often given conflicting information.
AYDEN MAGAZINE
