Honoring Durham’s Ancestors at Geer Cemetery

From far away, the clearing is small and silent. But among the sprinkle of trees, a small group of volunteers stand in pairs around shallow dips in the ground. 

Each dip is marked by a small flag. A volunteer is standing in one, holding a tool that looks almost like a Pogo stick with a spike at its end instead of a spring. The volunteers have been shown how to hold it, how to push this tool – called a probe –  into the sunken earth about every 6 inches, across the middle, then up around the edges where it rises. 

It’s not so hard. Here, the soil is soft, and the air is cool.

The probe hits something hard. A dull thump sounds, and the earth hums back. But after some digging, it turns out that this something is just a large tree root. 

He steps another 6 inches forward. The probe hits something else – something that creaks like an old seesaw. 

“We really don’t want to be digging a lot to get stuff out of the ground. It’s just not appropriate to do,” says Carissa Trotta, volunteer and board member of Friends of Geer Cemetery. “The mission, really, is to try to identify those who may be buried in those spaces, so we can bring back respect and honor to the site.”

Holding a small shovel, Trotta digs around the probe and reveals the source of the squeaking: an old metal grave marker. The probe pierced right through it. 

Friends of Geer Cemetery, a grassroots organization of volunteers, uses grave markers like these to identify grave sites at Geer Cemetery, a historically African American cemetery in Durham, North Carolina. Since its inception in 2003, the organization has led cleanup efforts to maintain the once-neglected cemetery and has been working with firms to perform archaeological services, such as identifying and resetting headstones. 

And despite there being no surviving records from the cemetery itself, volunteers have researched the genealogy and history of those buried, reconstructing stories of their lives.

“Before we were recovering, and now we’re kind of restoring, and we start to look at how were cemeteries maintained,” says Debra Taylor Gonzalez-Garcia, president of Friends of Geer Cemetery.

Trotta often tells new volunteers about the history of the metal grave markers. Once, they would hold a paper with the information of the deceased, protected by a thin wall of glass. 

But like the one the probe pierced, the paper on nearly all the grave markers is lost. Now, only the metal remains. 

As it continues restoring the cemetery, Friends of Geer Cemetery has new questions ahead of it. How do you preserve the cemetery for generations to come? And how do you honor all the people buried when some of their stories are still unknown?

Until 2019, private donations funded the bulk of Friends of Geer Cemetery’s work. But then, the organization received its 501(c)(3) status – and started applying for grants. 

More than a year later, the North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office announced the recipients of the Emergency Supplemental Historic Preservation Hurricane Disaster Relief Fund. Friends of Geer Cemetery applied in partnership with the nonprofit Preservation Durham, another organization dedicated to preserving Durham history, under a subgrant for survey projects and resiliency planning to better prepare cultural resources against future disasters. 

And in January of 2021, they got it. 

The grant, amounting to nearly $48,000, was used to pay for various archaeological services. Cultural resource management firm Richard Grubb and Associates, Inc. performed much of this archaeological work over the next few years, from ground-penetrating radar to a Light Ranging and Detection Survey. 

The archaeological work investigated the number of depressions in the cemetery, which are the dips and slopes in the ground. Sometimes, these depressions are just a part of the earth’s terrain. But they can also represent burial places, where wooden caskets disintegrated into the earth over time. 

Between roughly 600 and 1,400 possible grave depressions line the cemetery, according to the Light Ranging and Detection Survey. Some are just 2 or 3 feet deep. 

These surveys revealed more than just the number of depressions. They revealed where they are and why that matters.

“From the air, what you couldn’t see from the ground is that there were definitive rows in the cemetery, that the cemetery was purposefully planned,” Trotta says. “And sometimes there’s a mythology that, or, you know, racist attitudes of you know, [African American] folks just bury the people in the ground, they didn’t have any of that right? But that’s not accurate in this space.”

As the restoration process continued this year, Friends of Geer Cemetery leadership realized that future projects couldn’t start before it knew what exactly was in these depressions.

“Even the things that we wanted to do, we had to be really careful because if we want to put a sign there, we have to make sure we don’t put a sign where somebody is buried,” says Deidre Barnes, one of 11 members of the Friends of Geer Cemetery board. “You know, we don’t want to dig down into somebody’s grave.”

Barnes is also a co-chair of the Friends of Geer Cemetery Descendant Council. These two groups, which have four overlapping members, lead the decision-making of the cemetery work. 

This year, Trotta began training volunteers to probe. The probe only goes down a few inches to find signs of a burial site, like metal grave markers, slate pieces, bricks, or stones. Not every family had enough money for headstones, and many would use other items to show where their loved ones were buried. 

In fact, while Friends of Geer Cemetery estimates there are about 1,650 burials in the cemetery, only around 200 have monuments that are still visible.

Durham’s African American families did not have access to a public, city cemetery until the opening of Beechwood Cemetery in 1924, more than 50 years after the city itself was founded, according to Preservation Durham. Until Beechwood was established, there was only one city cemetery, Maplewood, and it was restricted to white citizens. 

Geer Cemetery was privately owned. Jesse B. Geer, a white farmer, sold the land in 1877 to the three African American men – John O’Daniel, Nelson Mitchell, and Willis Moore – who then created Geer Cemetery. Copies of this deed can be found in the Durham County Main Library.

While the city health department officially closed Geer Cemetery for overcrowding in 1939, according to Preservation Durham, Friends of Geer Cemetery has found that the last documented burial occurred in 1945. 

A history of neglect would soon follow.

When Barnes was a child, her grandfather drove her past Geer Cemetery.

“You know, you’ve got family in there,” he told her. 

But when she looked, all she saw was woods. And she wondered, how could she have family living in the woods?

The Durham City Council had occasionally funded cleanups of Geer Cemetery before, often working through other organizations. But by 2003, it had been 12 years since the city’s assistance and since any coordinated cleanup of the cemetery.

The overgrowth returned. Vines of poison ivy, thick as an arm, climbed up and dangled from trees. Underbrush flourished, suffocating the ground. Several people, including Durham historian Robert Kelly Bryant, who had organized cleanups of the cemetery before, became increasingly concerned. 

“Mr. Bryant and I thought we could call a meeting in the library, and then people would come out of the woodwork that were interested in the cemetery,” says Jessica Thompson Eustice, former secretary of Friends of Geer Cemetery. “And they did, and that was our first meeting, and Kelly Bryant dubbed it Friends of Geer.”

Eustice became secretary for the newly formed volunteer organization, led by Bryant, which returned to the City Council with the same request. 

Again, it was answered. 

More than $15,000 was approved for Triangle Residential Options for Substance Abusers, Inc. (TROSA) to do a one-time major cleanup, plus quarterly cleanings for a year. The city continued to do occasional cleanings of the cemetery, as did other longstanding partners like Keep Durham Beautiful.

In recent years, Friends of Geer Cemetery began clean-up efforts with new vigor. 

Back in 2018, the organization was rarely meeting, if at all. Then, a homeowner living in a house behind the cemetery grew wary of a tree near the cemetery’s edge and had it cut down, Gonzalez-Garcia says. 

“It was intentionally brought down and landed across the grounds,” Trotta says. “People were like, ‘What is happening’?”

It was like waking up from a deep sleep. Friends of Geer Cemetery started regularly meeting again, with Gonzalez-Garcia as the organization’s new president. The following year, the Descendant Council was formed, and the organization received its 501c(3) status. 

And they began regular Saturday cleanups to clear the trash and ivy from the back half of the cemetery, in part to prepare for future archaeological work they now had the vision and funding to realize.

Volunteers cleaned up beer bottles, car parts, soda cans, rugs, carpets, or whatever else was thrown there over the decades. The City of Durham frequently picked up this trash and participated in the cleanups too, especially by spraying poison ivy.

Workdays look different these Saturdays. Starting this year, volunteers have alternated between cleanup days and probe days.

One cleanup workday, the usual volunteers are joined by a small group of students from North Carolina Central University. And instead of trash, they’re recovering tree branches. 

Sweat sticks clothes to backs on a humid September morning. The volunteers load tree branches into tarps or wheelbarrows as they talk. Wheeling the branches across patches of periwinkle to the cemetery’s right edge is easy, but a heel slipping into uneven ground is even easier. It takes some practice to find the rows where the ground is flat and drive the wheelbarrow steadily over it.

One probe workday, volunteers probing at a depression found three stones just a couple inches below the surface. Two halves of a headstone were stacked neatly on top of a footstone. 

These stones, back together, mark the grave of Annie Bumpas, who lived between 1889 and 1911. It was also the first new headstone Friends of Geer Cemetery found by probing underground.

Most of the discovery and genealogy of the known graves in Geer Cemetery had already been done earlier by Friends of Geer Cemetery. But Bumpas was new to them. The organization had never seen her stone before, nor had it seen any mention of her in their records.

“It was good incentive to keep going,” Trotta says. “We hope to really be able to do that for more individuals.”

The Bumpas headstone was one of many that were reset this year.

Under the scorching heat of early June, Jason Harpe, director of cemetery conservation at Grubb and Associates, and another conservator stood more than 30 headstones back on their bases, funneling lime-based mortar through the cracks to hold them together. 

The largest they reset was a tall obelisk of swirled marble, memorializing three members of the Banks family on one side. They were landowners in Durham’s Hayti District, a thriving African American community that started in the late 19th century, according to Preservation Durham. 

Obelisk monument in Geer Cemetery in Durham, North Carolina. Photo by Tori Newby

“I tell my friends and people that I meet if you were born in Durham, and your mother was born, your parents were born in Durham, and your grandparents were born in Durham, you have relatives – you have ancestors in Geer Cemetery,” Barnes says. 

Now, Friends of Geer Cemetery hopes to backfill the depressions using dirt provided by the City of Durham. It’s a part of cemetery maintenance, and an important part of restoration, Gonzalez-Garcia says.

Leveling the ground would also make the process of families visiting their loved ones safer and easier. 

Barnes got involved with Friends of Geer Cemetery in the early 2000’s after reading a news article about them. When she saw where the volunteers worked, she became interested. Her grandmother’s maiden name was Geer.

“Is there a connection, Grandma?” she had asked.

“Yeah,” said Fannie Mae Geer Barnes. “My father was buried there.”

“Okay. Well, I think I’m going to join this group and see what it’s all about.”

“Okay.”

Barnes’ great-grandfather was born into slavery to Frederick C. Geer and a woman named Priscilla, who was enslaved on his father’s plantation, she says. Preservation Durham records indicate Frederick Geer was likely to be the son of Jesse B. Geer. 

And while Barnes’ father was quite excited about her research, especially as she learned more of her own family history, her grandmother could remember where the plantation was, where the tree stump at which enslaved African Americans were sold remained. 

“They’re bad memories, and she didn’t want to relive those bad memories and didn’t necessarily want to connect with that side of her family,” Barnes says.

Friends of Geer Cemetery knows of at least 50 descendants like Barnes. Many of those buried at Geer were born into slavery, omitted from records and ignored by their city. And many descendants of those buried at Geer Cemetery have moved away, made lives elsewhere. 

As the year comes to a close, Friends of Geer Cemetery will start hosting tours. Eventually, the ground will become too hard to probe. Now, more than ever, it’s important to recognize those buried at the cemetery whose identities are still unknown.

“It’s been, it’s been an incredible, fascinating journey these last five years to be involved, as [Deidre] say, with these people who have become our friends,” says Vera Whisenton, who co-chairs the Descendant Council with Barnes and serves as secretary for the Friends of Geer Cemetery board. Her husband’s ancestor was Margaret Faucette, the founder of White Rock Baptist Church, which was one cornerstone of the Hayti District.

The Descendant Council has spent some time deliberating how exactly it should honor the lives of people whose stories are unknown. 

“There were a couple of other designations that were mentioned,” Whisenton says. “But we all liked ‘beloved,’ so that’s our goal.”

So, as Friends of Geer Cemetery continues backfilling, these graves will start to be marked with something more permanent than the flags of the archaeological surveys. Something lasting even longer than the metal grave markers. 

A stone will be placed on these graves with just one word engraved.

Beloved: because these were people who loved and were loved.

Related