Geer Cemetery-Rufus Purefoy

Photographs and narrative source:
Friends of Geer Cemetery - Durham, NC

Rufus Purefoy was born on 10 January 1905. Shown here in a family collection photograph, likely taken in the latter 1920s, he was the youngest of six children born to Haywood and Sallie Ann Hedgepeth Purefoy.

Wed in 1887, they had already welcomed Emma (1892), Clarence (1894), Eula (1896), Buelah (1898), and George (1902).

The family home where Rufus spent his childhood was on Matthews Street. Now beneath the grandstand of Durham Bulls Athletic Park, this was a dusty row of segregated worker accommodations, just across the street from the enormous American Tobacco complex.

Like his father and most of his neighbors, Rufus found work in the tobacco industry from his teenage years. Two of his sisters, Emma and Eula, remained on the same block after their marriages, effectively extending the family into the community.

Eula and her husband, Sam McNeill, in turn hosted a nephew from his native Bladen County, Tom Black.

Likewise a tobacco worker, Tom was the same age as Rufus, and the two became friends.
They met up on Matthews Street on the Fourth of July, 1930, and apparently had too much to drink.

Tempers flared, the argument escalated, and they shot each other.
Staff at Lincoln Hospital worked through the night on the wounded men, but lost Tom Black at 3 and Rufus Purefoy at 8am on July 5th.

The burial site in Geer Cemetery initially intended for Sallie to rest beside her husband was used to bury her youngest son. Instead of an epitaph for a “loving wife and mother,” it reads, “A loving son, a kind brother.”

The fallen headstone for Rufus Purefoy and his father was uncovered in early 2019, and professionally reset on its base in a Restoration Awareness Ceremony that summer.

In the process, living members of the family were able to gather at their ancestors’ restored grave.