Sacred Spaces

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.

Tat’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 efort 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 includes numbered fags 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 ofcials.

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.

Te 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.

Tose dates are based on the graves with markers, according to Charles Ewen, an archaeologist in the ECU Department of Anthropology.

“Tere are three times as many unmarked graves,” he said.

Ewen and Dixon are part of a fve-member team of researchers who began studying the cemetery afer 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, 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 afer another, she said, but no one seemed to know who owned the property or who was responsible for it, and she was ofen given conficting information.

Edwards said that she wants people to know that, although the cemetery appears to be in a neglected state, it is not because it was abandoned or forgotten.

She and others were denied access to it, she said.

Improvements that Edwards has wanted to see for the cemetery include getting the graves cleaned of and the cemetery surveyed to fnd out just how big it is, she said.

She would also like for a fence to enclose it and a little driveway made so that people don’t have to park on the side of the road when visiting the cemetery.

Getting Started

Today some of the things Edwards wants for the cemetery are beginning to happen.

She credits Ayden’s mayor pro-tem for taking action.

“Te last person that I went to is the one who got it moving and that was Commissioner Ivory Mewborn,” Edwards said.

Mewborn brought the issue of the old cemetery before the town board in 2018, he said.

No one on the board at that time was aware of the cemetery, but members were open to the idea of fxing it up, Mewborn said.

It was also around that time that Mewborn coined the term “4AC,” which stands for Ayden African American Ancestral Cemetery and is now commonly used.

Among the members of the town’s Board of Commissioners, the idea emerged that perhaps a Boy Scout, for an Eagle Scout project, could make a walking path through the cemetery, according to Mewborn.

Tat’s when ECU professor and archaeologist Charles Ewen entered the picture.

Te town manager at the time, Steve Harrell, approached Ewen about the Scout project, Ewen said.

“Mr. Harrell wondered if my ground-penetrating radar (GPR) might indicate unmarked graves that could be avoided by the trail,” he said.

When Ewen visited the cemetery, he realized that it was much larger than he had expected and suggested that the proposed project might be a bit much for a Scout, he said.

Finding And Flagging

Te cemetery covers approximately 1.5 acres, according to Ewen.

Te Scout instead ended up building a wooden bridge that leads to the entrance of the cemetery, he said.

“(Ten) upon refection, I thought that the mapping of the cemetery might make a nice project for my public archaeology class in the spring of 2020,” he said.

With Harrell in agreement, Ewen and his students did some limited clearing so that they could reveal the stone and grave depressions in the underbrush, Ewen said.

Te earliest eforts were put on hold when things shut down because of COVID, he said.

However, since then, work has resumed and a visitor to the cemetery today will encounter 400 graves, each one bearing a pink stake fag.

Te fags are numbered 1-400, Ewen said.

Some of the graves are merely indentations in the ground while others have headstones.

Using a total station (a transit and an electronic station all in one), Ewen and his students are developing a map that plots each grave’s location with directional coordinates.

Caring for the 4AC

Through 2024, with the help of the community, researchers from ECU will be taking the following steps with the Ayden African American Ancestral Cemetery: • Conduct an archaeological study of the area • Make digital maps of the cemetery • Transcribe all headstone inscriptions into a cemetery database • Reconstruct genealogies of those in the cemetery and tie them to living community members • Use archival documents from Ayden to reconstruct the cemetery’s history • Curate an Ayden Museum exhibit • Create a website with research plans, updates and downloadable information • Interview Ayden citizens about what they know about the cemetery and what they’d like to see done to it in the future • Based on answers, we will work with town ofcials and share what we fnd with anyone who is interested

For more information contact Ryan Schacht at schachtr18@ecu.edu. The cemetery can be found on Google Maps by searching for Ayden African American Ancestral Cemetery.

Eric Bailey, a member of the ECU research team, takes a group photo of the team meeting with Ayden town officials on Nov. 15 at Bum’s Restaurant downtown.

“I hope to have at least a preliminary map by the end of the year,” Ewen said.

Tere are plans to establish a website at which a person will be able to view the map, see where a particular grave is located and then be able to fnd it easily when actually in the cemetery, according to Ewen.

At some point there could also be a physical map displayed at the cemetery, he said.

Expanding The Project

A project that started out with the mapping of graves has expanded further.

Ewen said that his colleague, Ryan Schacht, thought what he was doing in Ayden was interesting and wondered if there was room for a cultural anthropologist to work with the living community and their recollections of the cemetery while Ewen documented the deceased.

Bringing other professors onto the project, Schacht pursued grants and ended up receiving one from the National Science Foundation and one from the National Endowment for the Humanities, according to Ewen.

As a result, Eric Bailey and Cindy Grace-McCaskey, both cultural anthropologists, are conducting interviews in the community to fnd out what people’s memories about the Ayden cemetery are.

Ivory Mewborn said that he has participated in a formal interview with Bailey and found him to be “very professional, very cordial, very engaging and … a great interviewer.”

Te information gathered during conversations is confdential, Bailey said, and is recorded in a manner that does not identify the names of the people being interviewed.

Bailey said that interviews are conducted in places where interviewees feel comfortable, for example at Sheppard Memorial Library.

Helen Dixon, a historian with a background in mortuary landscape and museum studies, is researching the “public history side” of the project, she said.

She is studying the history of the land itself by looking at old documents and records, and is looking at ways the cemetery can possibly be a site for the public, she said.

Tere are many ideas for what to do, Dixon said, but the researchers want to listen to what the community wants because it is a sacred space, the burial place of Ayden’s ancestors.

Telling The Story

In the meantime, Dixon has been adding some information to a website called fndagrave. com, which is free and accessible to the public.

“Find a Grave” is a site described as “the world’s largest gravesite collection” with “over 190 million memorials created by the community since 1995.”

Dixon said there was already a page set up for a Dixon-StocksKitrell family cemetery at Find a Grave. It is the same cemetery now being referred to as the Ayden African American Ancestral Cemetery and that name has been added to the page.

Te address is https:// www.fndagrave.com/ cemetery/2660213/dixon-stocks-kitrell-family-cemetery.

Dixon has updated the page by posting a photo of every headstone in the cemetery and a transcript of what researchers can see on the headstone, she said.

Te most direct link to the full list of legible headstones is at tinyurl.com/4ACgraves.

Te Find a Grave website is diferent from a separate website that Dixon will design, the one that will display Ewen’s map, she said.

Te purpose of the website that Dixon plans to create will be to tell stories about those buried in the 4AC and add photos and context that can present a fuller story of the history of the cemetery and its inhabitants, she said.

In addition to a website there are plans to curate an Ayden Museum exhibit.

One story that the headstones tell is that a large number of people buried in this cemetery very likely died in the 1918 fu pandemic, according to Dixon.

It is very apparent because so many death dates on the tombstones are from 1918 and are way out of line in number compared to other years, she said.

Dixon said it is easy to acknowledge rationally that it must have been a tough time in history.

“But to see it represented in a cemetery it also just sort of takes your breath away that we are in one pandemic and we are looking at the tragic results of the last major pandemic across America,” she said.

While the Ayden portion is a major component of the team’s research, it is only one part of a larger project, according to Schacht.

Te grants, which are for three years, also fund research to quantify the scale of African American cemetery loss in North Carolina, including other areas of Pitt County, he said.

Moving Ahead

Doing repair work in the cemetery and taking perpetual care of the burial ground, will not be the responsibility of ECU, but will be up to the town of Ayden and the community, according to Ewen.

Ewen said that establishing something like a “Friends of the 4AC Cemetery” group would be helpful and that he has seen that type of organization work well elsewhere.

He also suggests that civic organizations and church groups get involved.

Ayden’s town board is supportive, ofcials said.

So far, a small gravel pull-of area has been installed by the town so that cars do not have to park along the road.

Plans are being discussed to put up a memorial sign along the highway to identify the cemetery, according to Matt Livingston, Ayden’s town manager.

Te research team is extremely attuned to the fact that these are Ayden’s ancestors, Dixon said, and she knows that every member of the community wants to see the cemetery treated respectfully, given the nature of the site as a burial place.

She hopes that the team can draw out people’s dreams for this site, she said.

“… My hope … is that it becomes a place that the whole community can be proud of.”

Many of the 400 graves are unmarked but others have headstones and markers. Many of those are in disrepair.