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Each month, we’ll throw a dart at a map and write about where it lands.

LOCATION: 9641 McCoy Rd., Huntersville

9641 McCoy Rd.

In Peace

An afternoon in the sacred quiet of McCoy Slave Cemetery

IT’S SERENE AND VERDANT HERE, which seems appropriate, because nestled in this spot a few yards back from winding McCoy Road is the nal resting place for dozens of people buried generations ago. The rst thing that strikes you is what’s missing: headstones. Only pine straw, leaves, and patches of periwinkle cover the ground.

The 25 to 50 men, women, and children buried at the McCoy Slave Cemetery worked in the elds and home of farmer Albert McCoy and his family from the slave days of the 1840s through the postEmancipation 1880s. The McCoy family erected a stone marker here in 1928 to honor three of them: Jim, Lizzie, and Charles. The names of the rest remain a mystery.

Members of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, a mile away, care for the site. A chain-link fence that had fallen into disrepair surrounded the property until 2002, when an Eagle Scout, Kellen Osburn, cleaned it up and installed a Virginia rail fence.

Five years later, as more historyseekers started coming around, Michael Thompson, a Pfei er University history professor and St. Mark’s Episcopal member, decided the cemetery needed a historical marker with information and context. Now people can park in a small gravel lot, walk the short distance to the cemetery, read Thompson’s words, and understand the sacredness of the ground where they stand.

“It is not lost on us what it means not only to the history of the church but to the history of our area and our country,” Thompson says. “Having something tangible to see and experience makes it a little more real than it otherwise would be.” —Cristina Bolling