CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Paula Williams visited her great-grandmother’s grave for the first time in years in September 2020.
Though she grew up in Charlotte, the cemetery where her great-grandmother Maggie Winchester and great-great-grandparents Frank and Amanda Lee were buried was “out of sight and out of mind” for most of Williams’ childhood. A recent conversation with a cousin revealed that the cemetery wasn’t being kept up.
As she stepped through the tall grass, she looked for her great-grandmother’s name among the headstones.
But it was nearly impossible to find, despite there being fewer than 50 graves in the small cemetery. Caked dirt and overgrown weeds made many of the names on the tombstones unreadable — including Winchester’s.
“I must have walked around to every grave out there,” Williams remembered. “I was honored to see her name finally, but you couldn’t really read it. It kind of bothered me.
“I decided that something needed to be done about it.”
The Siloam Cemetery, sometimes spelled “Salome,” is tucked away in north Charlotte on a quiet road off Interstate 85. The cornerstone of the Siloam community was the Siloam Presbyterian Church, which the cemetery was attached to until a fire destroyed the church decades ago.
Now, the last vestiges of the community are the Siloam School, a historic Rosenwald School built to educate Black children in the segregated rural South in the early 1900s, and the cemetery a few miles away, which historians believe was likely built by newly emancipated people when they built the church.
A renewed effort to restore the cemetery has recently been sparked by relatives of the people buried in the cemetery’s three dozen graves. And the Mecklenburg chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Charlotte Museum of History have joined the mission.
“People who were buried out there made some sort of contribution to life in Mecklenburg County,” Williams said. “I feel like every life deserves to be cherished.”
Cleaning it up
Though Frank Bauknight was a young boy when he met his great-grandfather, he remembers him well.
“I think he was kind of fun, and the rest of them couldn’t take it,” Bauknight said. “He was always thinking ahead of the game. … He was off the chain.”
In an Observer article from 1956 that lists Lee’s age as 115, Lee recalled his days in slavery and is quoted as saying “only the Lord” could explain his longevity.
He only lived a few years after the article’s publication, Bauknight said, and he is buried in the Siloam Cemetery. After Lee’s death, Bauknight said he’d only visited the cemetery once for a family funeral — until he heard about Williams’ effort to breathe new life into it months ago.
It took Williams many calls and many hours to find out that the cemetery was owned by the Presbytery of Charlotte. Then, she started meeting members of the committee in charge of maintaining the cemetery.
“Let’s keep it clean in respect of the people buried there,” Williams remembers saying to them. “Let’s clean it up, make it look presentable. You wouldn’t even know it was a cemetery.”
They’ve been waiting to hear from the Presbytery for months about fixing the cemetery fence, as well as adding lighting and a sign, but in the meantime, two other organizations have stepped in to help.
Siloam Cemetery
Since 2017, the Charlotte Museum of History has raised nearly three-fourths of its $1 million goal to relocate the historic Siloam School from its north Charlotte home to display at the museum in an effort to preserve an important piece of local Black history.
Fannie Flono, who chairs the museum’s Save Siloam School Project, said preserving the cemetery was important to the museum, too, because so many of the people buried there contributed to the Siloam School and the rest of life in that community.
And now that the area surrounding the cemetery is quickly being developed, the cultural landscape of the Siloam community is being lost.
Angel Johnston, a museum historian, said one of the intentions with preserving the school and cemetery is to document what life was like in rural Mecklenburg County.
Though there’s still a lot unknown about the cemetery, Johnston said the descendants of people buried there, like Bauknight and Williams, are helping historians learn more about Charlotte’s history through an oral history project.
“If we can connect with the people, then that’s a way for us to find out more about the community,” she said. “For cemeteries, not only are they places where you can learn about the history of your community, but they’re also important because of the memory and connection of family spaces.”
Jeanie Cottingham, a member of the Mecklenburg chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution and chair of the organization’s historic preservation committee, heard about the descendants’ plight to preserve the cemetery as a member of the museum’s board of trustees and wanted to get involved with their mission.
“So much African American history has been pushed to the side,” she said. “These stories deserve to be told.”
Back to life
Under a cloudy sky, nearly two dozen members of all of the parties invested in maintaining the gravesite — the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Charlotte Museum of History and descendants of the people buried there — gathered in the Siloam Cemetery on April 2.
For hours, the group picked up trash, cleared leaves and branches from the graves and removed vines from the fence that encircles the cemetery. While he worked, Frank Lee was on Bauknight’s mind.
“I just kept thinking of him,” Bauknight said. “He came to mind then, and he comes to mind all of the time.
“Being there, it brought the family together.”
More cleanup days will be scheduled throughout the year. Though Williams couldn’t attend the most recent event, she plans to come to the next one. And Bauknight will return soon — there are still vines on the fence, and he’s newly determined to get them off.
“It’s instrumental we go up and try to keep this place alive, rather than let it sit and deteriorate,” he said.
“We’re gonna try to get this thing back to life.”
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