Item:
Title
Preservation of Geer Cemetery
Body
Date of BOCC Meeting: August 10, 2020
Request for Board Action:
Agenda Text
The Board is requested to approve a letter from the County Manager, or other appropriate County official, saying that the County is asserting its authority as protector of an abandoned cemetery under NCGS for the purpose of making the grant application and a signature as "owner" on the application.
Preservation Durham, in partnership with the Friends of Geer Cemetery, is applying for a grant provided by the National Park Service (NPS) pursuant to its Emergency Supplemental Historic Preservation Fund (ESHPF): Florence, Yutu, and Michael (FYM) Recovery Grant Program to complete a preservation project at Geer Cemetery. The Geer Cemetery was Durham's primary African-American burying ground between 1877 and 1927, when the city finally provided a public cemetery for African-Americans (Beechwood). There are at least 2,000 graves in Geer. The project to be funded is a thorough archeological survey of the grave evidence (tombstones, grave depressions, etc.), in the cemetery and preparation of a nomination to the National Register of Historic Places. This will, for the first time, provide us with record knowledge of what we have on the ground and we can arrest the slow disappearance of the evidence of so many Durham lives.
A requirement of the grant submittal is permission from the "owner." The Geer Cemetery is an abandoned public cemetery under NC law. It is unknown who the owners are. There are no extant records. The question of cemetery ownership and abandoned cemeteries is so common that NC has enacted a law that empowers a County government to assert of form of statutory oversight over an abandoned cemetery in its jurisdiction. This oversight is not limited in scope or duration. The County's authority runs to the marking of the cemetery and protecting it from encroachment. Because the grant project is essentially a survey of the cemeter...
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