It’s easy to pass by a heavily-wooded 2.1 acre preserve at the northwest corner of Colony and Sharon roads without realizing it is a historic landmark.

PHOTO/PAUL WILLIAMS III

This wooded area behind Morrison at SouthPark condominimums is the resting place of emancipated slaves at St. Lloyd Presbyterian Church Cemetery.

From her fifth-floor balcony at Morrison at South Park condominiums, Cher Cosper watches vines engulf a church cemetery for blacks in the years following Emancipation. She would like to see their resting place treated with dignity.

“I feel that it’s a just a crime whether it be black or white people in the ground,” said Cosper, an artist. “That was holy. It should be honored along with the people who have passed on.”

A 2004 survey and research report written by Hope Murphy, a UNC Charlotte graduate student and intern at Historic Landmarks Commission, identified 78 graves including adults and children, dating from 1868 to 1926. By obtaining death certificates, the report shows the harshness of their lives – primarily from diseases that led to premature demise – including lung ailments like pneumonia and tuberculosis, which are now largely curable, and Pellegra, a vitamin deficiency.

In 2005, a city ordinance designated the burial site, St. Lloyd Presbyterian Church Cemetery, as a historic landmark. The graveyard, owned by Grubb Preservation Foundation, a nonprofit with offices in Charlotte and Lexington, is one of the few reminders of Charlotte’s history as a rural farming community.

Clay Grubb, Chief Executive Officer of Grubb Properties’ real estate business and chairman of the separate nonprofit foundation, said some “major steps” in preserving the site were declaring it a historic landmark, and survey and research of the area.

“It’s right in heart of South Park, extremely valuable development with land that sells for millions of dollars,” he said. “I think it’s kind of exciting that there’s something in the heart of South Park, which you think of as certainly the wealth section of our town, something to commemorate it’s history right there in the heart of it. That area is very distinct from the modern history everybody has which is the changing of a cow pasture to a mall.”

The next step is to order a plaque, which the foundation hasn’t done yet because of lack of money. The foundation’s income comes from a quarter of 1 percent of the total price in perpetuity when a condo is sold.

“Our funding source has been handicapped due to recession, but the nice thing is it’s a permanent funding source,” Grubb said.

Ideally, the plan is to make the site available to the community to walk through along with an art component by African-American artists.

“We did this at a time when the market was a lot better and you could actually do something,” Grubb said. “And our goal is that as times gets better there will be more money to take what’s protected to the level that it is kind of user friendly.”

Dan Morrill, Historic Landmarks Commission director, said that he was interested in working out some sort of “interpretive scheme” because it’s an important site. 

“I think a historic marker ought to be put on the road so as people drive by there they will know that a historic site is located there,” Morrill said. “Obviously, it’s overgrown, and it needs to be cleaned up and maintained. It would be wonderful if at least a suggestion of what would have been the church building, some sort of sculpture would be put there on the site, and it would be nice to have a few benches to sit down and reflect on what that place was.”

UNCC Africana studies professor Akin Ogundiran said many African-American cemeteries established before the 1950s across the country tend to fall into disrepair because the blacks have been more mobile and communities that sustained those cemeteries tends not to be exist.

“We don’t have many monuments named after African-American leaders,” he said. “It’s these cemeteries where we find stories of real people.”

St. Lloyd Presbyterian served its congregation during the Jim Crow era when most of its members were poor and worked primarily as laborers, farmers, and domestics. The site is the original location of a church established in response to the newly-gained liberation of blacks from slavery,  an associated school, and cemetery. It’s unclear what happened to the church, but there is anecdotal evidence that it burned down. The building, which accommodated the church and school, no longer exists, leaving the graveyard as the physical marker to tell the congregation’s story.

“Kathleen Hayes, a freedwoman, railed against the practice of seating African Americans in the balcony of Charlotte’s First Presbyterian Church and called upon the black members of the congregation to ‘come out of the gallery and worship God on the main floor,’” according to the 2004 survey and research report. “The Northern Presbyterian Church responded to such urgings by establishing the General Assembly’s Committee on Freedman on June 21, 1865, which sent 40 white missionaries and teachers to the south.”

This Committee on Freedman assisted blacks in creating several churches in Mecklenburg County including St. Lloyd Presbyterian Church, among other churches. It also established primary schools, secondary schools and colleges, including helping to launch Biddle Institute, now Johnson C. Smith University.

Grubb said that the foundation hasn’t pursued other fundraising ideas for the cemetery. “It’s an option, but we have not figured out a good way to pursue it,” he said. “In the  immediate neighborhood, you have a lot of wealth, and I’m sure they’d love to see it maintained much nicer.”

To share fundraising ideas, contact Bobbi Coble, executive director of the foundation at (704) 372-5616 ext. 3102.

On the Net:

St. Lloyd Presbyterian Church Cemetery report
www.grubbpreservationfoundation.org

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