Whether they are small family plots or large city-owned and maintained properties, cemeteries can reveal a lot about an area’s history and its beginnings. In the Around Old Granville segment of The Local Skinny! Tuesday, Bill Harris and Mark Pace discussed a few prominent cemeteries in the Vance County area, some of which have graves that date back to before the late 1800’s.
But Pace said the oldest known graves are probably in a private cemetery on an estate near Williamsboro called Montpelier. There are graves there from the late 1700’s, he said, as well as at Ashland, the site of the original Henderson family cemetery.
Two of the larger and older cemeteries in Henderson are Blacknall and Elmwood.
A group of prominent Blacks formed the Union Cemetery Company in 1887 and purchased land from the Blackwell family to create a cemetery for African Americans. But how did Blackwell become Blacknall? Pace supposes that somehow the names became confused – if you’ve ever tried to read old handwritten documents, it stands to reason that someone somewhere simply spelled the name incorrectly, thus creating Blacknall Cemetery.
There are still Reavis family graves located in the middle of Blacknall Cemetery, Pace said, because originally it belong to that family. Those graves date back to the 1860’s and ‘70’s.
“It had gotten in bad shape in the 1970’s and ‘80’s,” Pace said. A consortium of civic groups and the city got together and raised awareness about the cemetery and cleaned it up, and it is still in use today, he added.
Elmwood Cemetery, established in 1879, is located at the end of Breckenridge Street. At that time, the dead were buried either in smaller family cemeteries or in church cemeteries. As the city of Henderson grew, the need for more and bigger cemeteries grew as well. The city bought Elmwood in 1935, and there are a number of graves that were relocated there from other cemeteries. Since then, two other sections have been added to expand the cemetery, Pace said.
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