SCALES #24: historic cemetery
Hello!
Welcome to a special Friday edition of SCALES! Conference travel last week, a conference-induced cold, and some busyness this week all kept this twenty-fourth edition from publication until now.
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Last week I was in Raleigh for the American Association of Aerosol Research conference. On the afternoon before the start of the conference proper, I walked up to the historic Oberlin Village neighborhood, one of the first free black communities in the state and the location of a cemetery, one of only four known African-American cemeteries in Raleigh.
The area was named after the Ohio college by an early resident of the village, James Henry Harris, who attended classes at the school. Harris was born into slavery, apprenticed as an upholsterer, freed in 1848 or 1849, spent time in Canada, Liberia and Sierra Leone following his studies in Oberlin, and then returned to his home state of North Carolina following the end of the Civil War. Harris and others bought land on what were farms of white landowners. "Property records indicate that Peck, a wealthy white grocer, ... sold [lots from his farm] to African-Americans for about $50 an acre, nearly nine times the going price for land in Wake County at the time. Neighboring landowners later followed suit." (News & Observer) Harris became director of the Raleigh Cooperative Land and Building Association, which provided many of the loans for the first residents of the area to build their homes. Later Harris served in the North Carolina House and Senate during Reconstruction.
"By 1880, the U.S. Census indicates that 177 families (roughly 750 people) called Oberlin Village home. Of those, 161 families are indicated as being African-American. Occupations of residents within Village are also noted by the Census. The dominant occupations included farm laborers, brick masons, house carpenters, and farmers. However, other occupations such as ministers, barbers, and shoemakers suggest that the community was self-sufficient." (Oberlin Cemetery Project)
The local preservation group, Friends of Oberlin, had just unveiled the historical marker the day before I visited.
The cemetery itself is now surrounded by apartments, retail, and office space in a heavily redeveloped area. The entrance to the cemetery is behind the parking lot of a former YWCA, now the InterAct Family Safety & Empowerment Center.
The cemetery site contains both the Oberlin Village Cemetery, officially deeded in 1873 and in use until 1971, as well as the active Pine View Cemetery, established in 1924. Written records are sparse, but oral tradition has that the location has a deeper history as the burial site for enslaved people from what was the nearby Cameron plantation.
As Raleigh expanded in the 1940s and onward, the village slowly became overtaken by new development, including the nearby Cameron Village shopping development, and was bisected by a new overpass. Only a few historic churches and houses from the era of Oberlin Village still remain.
According to the recollections of Dwight Peebles, who grew up in Oberlin Village, in around 1956 his Boy Scout troop had a "bravery test" of walking through the cemetery at night.
Friends of Oberlin is working with local universities and community colleges to map out the locations of the burial sites in the cemetery using a variety of forensic techniques, including terrestrial laser scanning and ground-penetrating radar. Many of the roughly 600 gravesites they identified in 2016 are unmarked depressions.
Beyond maintaining the upkeep of the cemetery, another goal of Friends of Oberlin is to have the site added to the National Register of Historic Places.
Information taken from some helpful online resources: "Oberlin Cemetery Project", "Revealing the Past at Oberlin Cemetery" (NC State News), "Discover Oberlin Cemetery, a Buried History of Black Prosperity Hidden in Cameron Village" (Indy Week), "No one owns Raleigh’s historic Oberlin Cemetery" (The News & Observer), "Neighbors work to preserve history of Oberlin Village" (The News & Observer), as well as from interpretive signs at the cemetery site. This set of pictures and words started its life as an Instagram post.
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"This study employs a simplified mechanical crawling infant to evaluate the resuspension of settled dust from carpeted flooring in full-scale chamber measurements." I have AAAR to thank for learning about the existence of this research. And don't worry, there's a suitably creepy video!
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—Adam