Abner. Susan. Dinah. Daphne. Charles. Moses. Peter. Henry.
Julia Robinson Moore read those names to the Charlotte City Council on Monday. They belonged, she said, to enslaved members of Sugaw Creek Presbyterian Church. They were baptized there, listed as congregants and admitted to communion, and they appear again and again from 1841 to 1865 in the records of the church session, its governing board.
Researchers told council they have found the names of more than 500 enslaved people they believe are buried in unmarked ground beside the church's two old cemeteries.
"Their bodies still remain there," she said.
At the end of the hearing, council voted without opposition to designate Sugaw Creek Presbyterian Church Cemeteries No. 1 and No. 2, at 335 W. Craighead Road and 4130 N. Tryon St., as local historic landmarks. Moore had also asked that the unmarked burial grounds and their boundaries be written explicitly into the designation. That was not taken up Monday.
Outside the fence
Within the cemeteries, the marked graves hold what Moore called "Charlotte's who's who in terms of the founders," among them the Rev. Alexander Craighead, along with people who took part in the American Revolution. Moore and her fellow researchers place the unmarked graves just outside.
Sheila Bumgarner, a retired special collections librarian with the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, told council that research in the church's archives had turned up the names of more than 500 enslaved people "who we believe are buried in, excuse me, outside the cemeteries, one and two, around the fence and near the stone wall."
Moore, an associate professor at UNC Charlotte and a Presbyterian minister, said she identified the two unmarked burial grounds from periwinkle growing on the ground, from depressions in the land and from historic maps, then checked them against the church's session records.
The descendants
Moore said many of those buried there are ancestors of members of New Hampton Presbyterian Church, and that the living descendants do not know where their ancestors lie, though some may have heard it in family stories.
"They still need to find their ancestors and have them memorialized," she said.
She asked council for three things: to support the designation, to make sure the enslaved burial grounds and their boundaries are explicitly included in it, and to involve the descendants and the congregations of Sugaw Creek and New Hampton in the process.
The designation as advertised by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission covers the cemeteries and everything on the two tax parcels, "including without limitation all graves, grave markers, tombs, and architectural structures and features." That language protects whatever lies inside the two parcels' property lines. Whether the unmarked burial grounds fall inside those lines was not addressed at Monday's meeting.
Support for the designation
Matt Joyner, president of the Mecklenburg Historical Society, said Bumgarner and Moore are both directors of the society and that the Sugaw Creek graves are now a focus of its work. He noted that the cemeteries are not on the tax rolls, so the property-tax break that comes with landmark status has no effect here.
"Certainly this is a no-brainer," said at-large Council Member Dimple Ajmera, thanking Moore and Joyner. Council Member Reneé Johnson of District 4, who said she had worked with Moore before on the Mallard Creek cemetery, thanked her "for the important work you're doing in preserving the legacy of our ancestors."
Bumgarner said she hopes to find surnames for the people who appear in the records by first name only. "They say a person dies twice in this life," she told council, "once when they cross over and once when someone says their name for the last time."