Citizens Cemetery

Youths, Volunteers Uncover More Hidden Slave's Graves In Historic Black Cemetery In Madison, Rockingham County, NC
By Susie C. Spear- staff writer for RockinghamNow - May 29, 2019

Editor’s Note: This is the first installation of a series that will explore African-American history and forgotten historic black settlements in Rockingham County.

MADISON — As Trenton Phelps parted waist-high grass last fall to uncover tombstones here, he realized he could rally young hands to help reveal part of his small Southern hometown’s African-American history.

Some nine months later, the teen and other community volunteers and historians are poised to ask state and federal agencies to designate Citizens Cemetery, which sits within the bounds of the town’s pre-Civil War black settlement Freetown, as a protected historic site.

“These were the people who helped the town … who built the town and did a lot of work and helped Madison become what it is today,’’ Phelps, 17, said of the more than 325 gravesites in the long-neglected burial grounds on Nichols Street, where volunteer researchers have already discovered the graves of nine slaves.

“When I first came here and I saw all the grass up high … and when I started reading all the names and going to the graves, it gave me a real human-like feeling, and I thought, ‘How can these people be buried like this?’ ’’ said Phelps, who with his father Travis Phelps, and other town and community members orchestrated a transformative clean-up of the site in late fall.

Trenton gathered other young members of his service club Your Community United Juniors, or YCUJ, and his dad coordinated with Madison Town Manager Kevin Baughn and local attorney Jack Webster. Baughn volunteered time and equipment for the spruce up, along with Chief Mike Rutherford and Capt. Jason Hood of the Madison Police Department.

The effort also saw local landscaper Shawn Reeder and leaders of area black churches turn out with weed eaters and mowers to skirt marked and unmarked graves.

After bushwhacking tall grasses, youngsters moved in with soapy buckets and brushes and scrubbed mildew and dirt from scads of monuments marking well-known names in the black community — Moseley, Dalton, Scales, LeSeuer, Camp, Wall, Foust, and more.

Since then, the Phelps father-son team, YCUJ kids, and dozens of volunteers have shifted to the task of recording names and tallying the number of graves along the rolling acreage where dozens upon dozens of unmarked plots appear as gentle divots.

“When kids got out here to clean this thing, they started asking real questions: Who are these people, how many graves are there, and who were they in life?’’ said Travis Phelps. “As moms, dads and grandpas, we couldn’t answer those, so that’s how the research started.’’

The youths’ enthusiastic burst in response to finding historic evidence is a type of curiosity that’s familiar to teacher and historian Valencia Abbott of Reidsville.

In fact, Abbott helped fellow black historian Fletcher Dalton lead the very seminar about Freetown last August at the Madison Public Library that ignited Trenton Phelps’ interest in the settlement.

“When we allow these students to see these diverse stories … when they become personally connected and engaged with them, it becomes what they are interested in. It’s not my story, it’s our story,’’ Abbott said. “We have to pass those stories down.’’

“History in our own backyard’’ is powerful and has a “deeper connection” for students, Abbott said. And when a student knows about an historic site and can say, “this is a mile from my house, this is where my family grew up … it starts making pieces fall into place.’’

Beyond that, Citizens Cemetery is a touchstone to family lineage for many area African-American families who may not have the benefit of a thorough paper trail to the past, Abbott said, explaining vital records for blacks were not thoroughly maintained by the county and state during past centuries.

For African-Americans, “cemeteries can be that link to finding your roots,’’ Abbott said. “You have to remember, if someone is looking for validation of their past, that headstone could be the only source they have. That could be it.’’

Hopeful that the state Department of History & Archives will ultimately deem the site an historic landmark, Abbott said, “For some people, this is it, and if we don’t preserve it, it could be lost forever.’’

Trenton Phelps has watched his black elders walk the grounds and discover their connections to the graves.

Saturday saw the Phelps duo and a host of volunteers out studding grave sites of known veterans with American flags for Memorial Day.

“When you get to meet some of the other community members and they say, ‘I knew that person when I was younger,’ it gives you the feeling that this has to be fixed, ‘cause these were real people and they had friends, families and loved ones, just like everybody else,’’ Trenton Phelps said. “I feel excited for doing something for the black community … after how they were treated.’’

In an effort to record the graves, volunteers like grandmother Wendy Puckett have discovered dozens of unmarked sites that extend several acres through a heavily wooded thicket to a creek.

Travis Phelps hypothesizes that scads of yet-to-be uncovered graves … likely those of slaves … are closest to the creek.

When genaeology enthusiast Puckett of Sandy Ridge isn’t walking the cemetery grounds with her notebook, trying to solve riddles of relationships between scores of souls, she’s searching for clues within family Bibles and on internet ancestry sites.

Her three grandchildren are active in helping with the cemetery project through YCUJ.

And you could say she’s developed something of a kinship with those who rest here.

“These are my people,’’ Puckett said, chuckling, while surveying the grounds on a recent afternoon. Reciting names and biographical tidbits about Madison’s late African-American citizens, she said, “I mean, I can almost tell you where half the people are here.’’

“One amazing man was Anderson Scales,’’ she said of the slave whose grave she recently located. “He ended up starting his own draying business. He took mail from the train depot in Madison all the way to Mount Airy on horse, two or three days a week. He had a grocery store on Ayersville Road,’’ she said of Scales, who died at 96. “And at night, he taught people.’’

Another grave she identified is that of James Foust, a slave from Alamance County who moved to Madison and founded his own brick business before building the first Mount Carmel Holiness Church in Madison, Puckett said.

The next step for volunteers is to seek formal recognition from North Carolina’s Office of Archives and History within the state’s Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

Through the agency, the cemetery may become a part of the North Carolina Cemetery Survey, a program for recording vital statistics from the state’s cemeteries whereby graves are officially identified, mapped and permanently preserved.

Further protection for the cemetery could come from a federal initiative to create a national database of historic African-American burial grounds as part of the National Park Service.

The legislation for the proposed African-American Burial Grounds Network Act was introduced this spring by U.S. Reps. Alma Adams of North Carolina and Donald McEachin of Virginia.

Such a statute would mean federal funding for research and technical support in the preservation of such sites.

“To honor them is of the utmost importance, so I’m hoping that will happen,’’ Abbott said of state and federal recognition and support. “My sincere hope is that if we’re going to talk about true history, we have to talk about all the truths and all the perspectives.”

Image: photograph of Citizens Cemetary before volunteers began clearing it. Madison, NC -Photo credit Travis Phelps
Source:https://www.greensboro.com/.../article_ec2ee78c-12ce-5cae...