Neighborhood Photos

Discovering Geer Cemetery

If you've ever walked along Colonial St., which marks the east boundary of the Duke Park Neighborhood, you've seen an overgrown wooded lot between McGill Place and Camden St. If you look closely enough, and it's early enough in the year, you'll see gravestones dating back to the late 19th century peeking through the weeds and ivy.

There's a lot of durham's story that is told by those stones, and the souls resting beneath them. Neighbor Jesse Eustice tells the first part of the story of her discovery of the cemetery below.

In 1998, after having become exhausted from taking care of my father, I planned to join the throngs of the irredeemable by placing him in a nursing home. My husband David and I decided we wanted to look for a house in Durham. Within a few months, we were looking at a house east of Avondale drive, in the Duke Park Neighborhood of the City of Durham. It was a farmhouse built in 1920 with a large porch in front. We knew nothing about it except that it met our needs for space, location, and basic aesthetics. We knew that it had a large porch. We liked the fact that while near the downtown area, you could still see about two acres of totally overgrown land filled with tall hardwood trees, bushes, and vines. Very curious in a Durham neighborhood which was otherwise developed.

The real estate agent, Paul Stinson, looked it up. He found that it was listed as a cemetery. I drove around the corner and saw the sign: “Geer Cemetery, 1877-1944.” This turned out to be the oldest African American Cemetery in Durham. Through a great deal of effort over several years, African American Historian R. Kelly Bryant had arranged for it to be cleared of underbrush. It was cleared by an organization called the “Durham Service Corps” in 1991. Canvassers then found the graves of such African American leaders as Margaret Ruffin Faucette, founder of the White Rock Baptist Church, Augustus Shepard, father of the founder of NCCU, and Edian Markham, founder of the Hayti District in Durham. Kelly Bryant and others put up the Geer Cemetery sign, and arranged for the Cemetery to be maintained annually by one of the classes in the city schools. Unfortunately, when the teacher involved moved on, and the project eventually fell through the cracks. The Cemetery became overgrown again. Still, in the winter when all the foliage dies down, one can see the grave markers standing very close to the road. Here I soon saw the most unusual grave marker I have ever seen. It is shaped like a lily.

I grew up in Durham County, in a big old one-story farmhouse in the woods off Randolph Road, a road which connects Erwin, and Pickett Roads. I knew the Pickett family were landowners in our area, although the “family farm” on which I lived belonged to Mrs. Few. Until my mother died in 1971, she worked at Duke Press. In those first years after we moved there, my father was in Graduate School in Chapel Hill. He had arranged his schedule so that he could stay home with me during the day. So, my father and I used to go walking in the woods, and one day we found a small graveyard, surrounded by a short iron gate.

When I was about 4 years old, I used to stand in the hall beside our kitchen and look out the screen door across the blackberry patch towards the woods, which concealed this little cemetery. I thought about what lay in the ground there, and wondered if I would ever get to see a real skeleton. When the moon was full and the wind was high before a spring thunderstorm, I imagined that the spirits rose out of the ground and would blow across the blackberry patch to my screen door. I would shiver and get goose bumps.

As I grew up and came of age in the south, I was aware of a painful irony inhabiting our serene southern hardwood and pine forests. Along with evening mosquitoes, screened doors, and the stifling heat of summer, I was aware of a cruel, static, battle going on between the frustrated ghosts of enslaved servants and the landowners who enslaved them. As I came of drinking age, and joined my ancestors that sweet dehydrated alcohol enhanced lethargy of summer, I discovered the terror of trying to avoid ghosts by playing dead.
So when my husband and I found this house, a farmhouse with a big porch and a mysterious cemetery right across the street, I sensed that I had come home to a house where I could quit playing dead. We bought the house, and I set about meeting my neighbors. >>MORE