Geer Cemetery-Charity Holman

Source for photograph and narrative: Friends of Geer Cemetery - Durham, NC

Charity Holman’s marble marker reminds us that today is the 181st anniversary of her birth. Though some of those enslaved at Stagville and further north in Person County shared this surname, we are unsure of her origins.

After emancipation, we find her first near West Point in the 1870 census, then closer to Durham a decade later. In 1880, Charity Holman is listed as a “washerwoman” with a son, William W. (12), and a daughter, Annie (7).

She appears in a trio of directories from 1887-1892, the last indicating she had moved to Whitted Street in the Hayti neighborhood. These few traces were all we knew of Charity Holman’s half-century on earth until recently.

As cleanup efforts made headway in recent years, overgrowth where the Holman marker long stood in solitude was cleared to reveal other evidence nearby.

This stone now appeared squarely between the base for a larger monument with the name “Goodloe'' and a footstone initialed “T. J. G.” Research - including by Goodloe family descendants - has indicated this could be the grave of Thomas J. Goodloe, son of early Durham landowners who left enslavement at Stagville.

T. J. Goodloe became a manager at the nascent NC Mutual Life Insurance Company and an entrepreneur in his own right - starting a mattress factory on property he owned off Hayti’s Glenn Street. He was active in multiple fraternal orders and served White Rock Baptist Church as a trustee, deacon, and longtime choir member.

Before much of that, however, he had married a woman named Annie Holman in December 1890. The 1892 directory that had mentioned Charity Holman on Whitted Street placed the recently wed Annie and Thomas J. Goodloe at the same address.
Far from being alone, then, this marker for Charity Holman had been erected after her death in 1893 by a loving daughter and son-in-law, on a family plot where the latter would join her when he passed in 1915.

Geer Cemetery has held onto stories of African American life in Durham, the pieces stubbornly defying time, elements, and erasure to await respectful reassembly.

We honor you and your family this day, Charity Holman, and hope for more insights from the sacred space where you rest!