Unmarked Graves Located

BY ROSE POST
SALISBURY POST

First there was a barely perceptible instant of silence.

Then an almost audible gasp.

Had Bob Melia, the nationally known thermal imagining expert, really said he'd found evidence of 144 bodies in unmarked graves in the old slave and freedman's cemetery at the corner of North Church and West Liberty streets?

Yes - and more.

He also found evidence of another 22 unmarked graves on the other side of the stone wall which separates the Freedman's Cemetery from the Old English Cemetery.

And nobody on the Freedman's Cemetery Memorial Project committee had anticipated that many.

On Sunday at the last of three public meetings to gather information and plan a memorial for the cemetery, Joe Morris, Salisbury's urban resource planner, said you can identify a burial place walking or mowing over graves. He'd done that - and counted 38.

And Tuesday - when Melia climbed a 110-foot Salisbury Fire Department ladder to aim his heat-seeking camera at the cemetery - the Rev. Johnson Asibuo, chairman of the project committee and pastor of Soldiers Memorial AME Zion Church across the street, counted the marker flags. And he thought there might be 45.

But an estimated 144 on one side of the wall and 22 on the other for a total of 166?

"It's pretty impressive," said Jonathan Reynolds, coordinator of the history area at Livingstone College, who is heading the search for names of people buried there.

"You've made our jobs a lot harder," he added with mock complaint.

So far, the search has turned up nine names of people buried there. Driving to the meeting, he said, he thought maybe Melia would find evidence of about 70. But 166?

On the other hand, some members of the committee recalled that at their first meeting a year ago, Mel White, curator at Old Salem, estimated possibly 100.

His findings, Melia said, indicate some bodies were probably stacked and others were buried in multiple graves.

Cemetery boundaries

The Freedman's Cemetery measures 163 by 53 feet. It appears to have a 12-foot outer boundary on the Liberty Street side, and Melia's camera located another fence line inside the Freedman Cemetery about 4 feet from the stone wall.

That's consistent with the record summarized by Rowan historian James Brawley in 1975 when controversy erupted because the late Salisbury mayor, Don Weinhold, wanted to buy the unmarked area for a law office.

Brawley said records showed the cemetery was unenclosed for 60 years and slaves and freedmen were buried at the back end. In 1842 a legacy left money to enclose it, and a wooden fence was erected around the part that included the whites. In 1855 a granite wall replaced the wooden fence excluding the part occupied by the slaves and freedmen. That's the part referred to as the Freedman's Cemetery.

When Liberty Street was opened between Church and Jackson in 1903 bodies were found, and a private act of the state legislature was necessary before street work could continue. The act authorized the city to move the bodies to a "colored cemetery," now known as Union and Oakdale cemeteries at the end of Monroe Street beyond Livingstone College.

Melia divided the images he made of the Freedman's Cemetery into eight sections which represent various anomalies - or differences - in the temperature of the soil. That temperature difference indicates grave sites. *shHaphazard patterns

Those closest to the stone wall appear organized, almost planned in a regular pattern, he said. Then they become haphazard with multiple graves and finally some form seems to emerge again closest to the street.

"It almost appears that people were buried in a panic," he said. A study of the history of the time might show an epidemic or an outbreak of disease, like Salisbury's typhoid outbreak in the 1850s, that made people bury the dead quickly or other causes for the changing patterns and the multiple graves.

He also pointed out that the ground is extremely unstable in some areas.

"When you have a grade like that, over a period of time, it will move," he said. "You're going to lose about 20 feet width and 3 or 4 feet in depth," unless something is done. Baton Rouge had a similar problem. "They put pilings in and filled with dirt. I recommend a survey crew gets out there right away."

No graves are threatened by the slide at this point, he said. The problem is at the west end of the Freedman Cemetery adjacent to the county parking lot.

Kevin Cherry, head of the Rowan Public Library's history room, said the unmarked graves in the Old English Cemetery could be British soldiers who died in jail while Cornwallis was here during the Revolutionary War. His camp was where the Rowan Public Library is now, and his soldiers used the old town well at the back of the library property.

Later, Melia indicated he thinks the age of those graves - the oldest in the cemetery - would bear out Cherry's theory.

He also pointed out an unmarked wagon wheel sort of pattern around the base of a tree in the Old English Cemetery which he thinks probably represents a burial place of babies.

Mapping the lines

Joe Morris said today he will seek help from the city engineering department with mapping the lines Melia has painted on the grass at the cemetery showing the sections he has identified and to discuss stabilizing the property where the erosion is taking place.

And the project committee's next steps will be to compile a list of artists from which to choose someone to design an appropriate memorial, to continue to gather information about the cemetery and who's buried there and to collect information and memorabilia which is forming a foundation for African American history in this area at Heritage Hall at Livingstone College.

And Joe Morris said that, at the suggestion of Judy Newman, Rowan tourism director, he will send a brief description of the project to Governor Jim Hunt who is trying to identify ongoing efforts in the state to improve race relations.

And Melia, who has foregone his usual $2,500 a day fee, told the group he has found working in Salisbury a pleasure.

"I don't look at it as a task," he said. "I look at it as professional enjoyment."

Not that he was through when the meeting was over.

He returned to the cemetery today to complete his research of the area and will mail a report when it is all compiled after he returns home.

And there was a P.S. to his three days here. Salisbury's relationship with the thermal imaging expert, which started when he came here last spring to determine work on the site of the Confederate Prison, grew out of Melia's close relationship with Sandy Bogle's parents, J.C. and Iva Lee Chapman of Rosman.

And Monday they came here from Rosman to see Melia while he was in North Carolina, but Bogle's father didn't waste his time while he was here.

Tuesday he was at the cemetery helping Melia find graves.