Geer Cemetery-Jeff Bass

Photograph and narrative source: Friends Of Geer Cemetery - Durham, NC.

“Gone but not forgotten,”
the family of Jeff Bass had inscribed on his headstone, a lamb symbolizing the loss of a sibling and son just turned 18. Jeff was one of 15 children born to Charlie and Sallie Miller Bass. Married in Franklin County in 1895, they raised their growing family on farmland near Youngsville before migrating to Oak Grove Township in eastern Durham County around 1920.

Among 11 children ranging from 16 months to 20 years when the 1920 census was taken, 15 year-old Jeff was the oldest of four siblings still in school. Shortly thereafter, it seems the Bass family moved closer into town, with some members taking work in Durham’s factories.

The 1922 City Directory placed father Charles, Jeff, and another of his working-age siblings at 1307 Albright (now North Hyde Park Avenue) northeast of downtown.

By the next spring, however, Jeff developed a troubling throat tumor. Local treatment may have been unsuccessful; in late April 1923 he was admitted to the segregated State Hospital in Goldsboro.

Opened in 1880 as the “Asylum for the Colored Insane” and later known as Cherry Hospital, this was not a facility from which many African Americans returned in improved condition.

Jeff Bass was unfortunately no exception; after nearly five months supervising his care, the presiding physician recorded his death on the morning of September 9, 1923.

Securing the return of their son’s remains for burial at Geer Cemetery would have been a significant expense.

Many others who died in treatment at Goldsboro - including Jeff’s younger sister, Henrietta, who was committed to psychiatric facilities there for two years before she passed in 1927 - were interred at cemeteries on site.

Surviving family members spread across the city to live in the Walltown and Crest Street neighborhoods, while some remained in Albright.

The last siblings of Jeff Bass - an elder sister, Arletta Bass Harris, and a younger brother, Fleming Bass - died in the mid-1990s.