400-grave Black cemetery, Ayden, Pitt county NC

(1st Article)
ECU Researcher Uncovers 400 Graves In Abandoned African American Cemetery In City Of Ayden, Pitt County, NC.

By Nikki Hauser / WITN
Updated: Jun. 15, 2021 at 7:13 PM EDT

GREENVILLE, N.C. (WITN) - Off of Lee Street in Ayden sits an old, largely forgotten graveyard for African Americans.

ECU archaeology researcher Dr. Charles Ewen found nearly 400 graves at the site.

“This is the largest one that most people have forgotten about,” said Ewen, who has worked on several cemeteries. “400 is a lot of peeps.”

After a Boy Scout wanted to clean up the area as part of an Eagle Scout project, the town of Ayden realized they had a bigger discovery on their hands.

The town manager of Ayden, Matthew Livingston, said they recruited Dr. Ewen to solve the mystery of who these graves belong to.

“I guess they have been somewhat forgotten and we don’t want that to continue,” said Livingston.

Dr. Ewen, who runs the Archaeology Lab at ECU, brought his class to help uncover the graves. Together they found hundreds of mismatched gravestones, some just depressions in the earth, revealing the lost graveyard dating back to 1908.

“This starts during segregation. Blacks couldn’t be buried in the town cemetery, so they found a place where they could be buried,” said Dr. Ewen.

He said the fact that the graves are buried right next to a larger, town-maintained cemetery could point to why it was abandoned.

“As more and more people started burying people in the Northeast Cemetery, fewer and fewer people took care of things here until eventually, it just sort of...no one’s taking care of it,” he explained.

Dr. Ewen said the next steps include using technology to dig deeper into the earth to possibly uncover more graves and talking to the community to learn who was laid to rest there.

Town Manager Matthew Livingston said the land the cemetery sits on doesn’t belong to anyone. Technically that gives the town of Ayden ownership, and Livingston said they plan make the site accessible and restore it to the best of their ability.

Source: https://www.witn.com/.../ecu-researcher-uncovers-400.../...

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2nd Article Below
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Hidden African-American Cemetery With 400 Graves Found On Unclaimed Land in NC town

By Mark Price / N&O
June 14, 2021 11:43 AM, UPDATED June 18, 2021 03:28 PM

A rare example of land that belongs to no one has been found in the eastern North Carolina town of Ayden.

Nearly three acres along North Lee Street do not show up on tax records, and stand unclaimed in the town of 5,000 people.

Overgrown, seldom visited and classically spooky, the spot is known among town elders as an little known graveyard for African Americans, some of whom may have been born into slavery.

An investigation into the site’s mysterious past has been launched by East Carolina University, with plans to map it, log in the surviving grave markers, and use ground penetrating radar to find the borders. Ayden is approximately 90 miles southeast of Raleigh.

Charles Ewen of East Carolina’s Phelps Archaeology Laboratory says work began several weeks ago and the discoveries have been surprising.

“There are nearly 400 graves in the cemetery, the majority of which are simple unmarked depressions in the earth,” Ewen told McClatchy News.

“It is the largest abandoned cemetery I have encountered. I have investigated over two dozen cemeteries in the past two decades. ... You can drive by it and not even know it’s there.”

The earliest marked grave is from around 1908 and the most recent is from 1963, he says. More graves may be found when they use ground penetrating radar in the fall, Ewen said.

Among the mysteries is who is buried there and why it was largely forgotten, despite being adjacent to an active city-owned cemetery with about 1,000 graves. The larger cemetery dates to 1955, which means the history of the two graveyards overlapped for about a decade, Ewen said.

“There could be surprises, like coming across someone who was influential in Ayden history that people forgot were buried there,” Ewen said. “We helped reclaim an overgrown African-American cemetery in Bellhaven, North Carolina, and came across the grave of Little Eva. Is there another Little Eva in the cemetery? I don’t know.”

“Little Eva” Boyd was a 1960s pop singer and Bellhaven native known for such mega hits as the “The Loco-Motion.”

The cemetery project is expected to last three years and include interviews with people who have loved ones buried in the cemetery, Ewen said. Grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Science Foundation are funding the work.

Abandoned African-American cemeteries are a growing area of interest among anthropologists, who call them “forgotten parts of the landscape” and casualties of the segregation era. Experts want to find “patterns of abandonment and their causes,” Ewen said.

Ayden town officials asked Ewen to get involved after a Boy Scout announced in 2020 he intended to clean up the cemetery as part of an Eagle Scout project.

Conversations in the community have revealed people just blocks away didn’t realize the cemetery existed, which made Ewen even more interested in the project. The historic norm, he says, was for African-Americans to bury their dead on land no one else wanted.

“The African-American community in the segregated South was forced to bury their dead wherever they could find unused land and maintain it themselves,” Ewen said.

“In the 1960s, desegregation meant that there was a town-maintained cemetery they could make use of. Families maintained the old cemetery for awhile, but it gradually fell into neglect as it was nobody’s job to take care of it. This is very common on small family cemeteries of all races. And here we are 60 years later where few people even know about it.”

The cemetery had largely returned to the wild when Ewen first set foot on it. This included a covering of oak trees, blackberry thickets, poison ivy and occasional pockets of daffodil, a plant historically used to mark graves.

Ayden town officials have expressed an interest in restoring the cemetery’s reputation in the community.

Town manager Matthew Livingston says the town “technically” owns the site by default, and he’d like to see it protected and made more accessible. He also has ideas for a historical marker at the spot and a trail.

“It’s the final resting place for many souls. This project would honor them and demonstrate that all citizens of all races do matter, past, present and future,” Livingston told McClatchy News.

“It’s a part of our history that should be remembered, restored where possible and not forgotten. Loved ones are buried there and we need to respect their final resting place. We (also) need to honor the families that have loved ones there by at least recognizing the cemetery exists.”

Source: https://www.newsobserver.com/.../article251209689.html

Photos of Newly discovered 400-year-old Black cemetery in Ayden, Pitt county NC.
Photo Credits:
Top - WNCT
Right top - WITN
Right Bottom - News & Observer photo by Charles Ewen