DUNN, N.C. — Harnett County’s oldest African American cemetery has hundreds of unidentified graves. For more than a decade, people have been working to restore it and figure out who the graves belong to, and all of that work culminates this weekend with a monument dedication.
“The white crosses are here because we don't know who was buried there. We just know there's a body there and so people have donated those crosses,” Desi Campbell, the executive director of the Harnett County African American Center, said.
At one time, Wilkins Cemetery was the only place in Dunn where people of color could be buried. The grounds were neglected over the years and things fell into disrepair.
“This place was nothing but woods and they came out here and cleaned it up. And it took them about 15, 20 years,” Campbell said.
Campbell is one of community members helping to restore the cemetery.
“Unidentified African Americans, people that are probably in my family or the families that are here in Harnett County. And we just don't know that they're here unless somebody comes up and says, ‘Hey, this is where my family is buried,’” Campbell said. “But I just love history. I just love helping people find their genealogy, helping people find their family.”
Campbell learned that because the cemetery wasn’t maintained, hundreds of graves don’t have markers.
“My job was to actually catalog all these people and put them together and see if we can connect people that are out here with people that are living in Harnett County or living wherever,” Campbell said.
The unidentified graves could be missing puzzle pieces to a family’s story.
“As a genealogist of African American history, we cannot find a lot of grave markers of some of our ancestors. A grave marker is actually a piece of history,” Campbell said.
Over the last three years, Campbell has helped raise about $3,000 for a new monument that will feature 19 people that are buried there, some of whom were slaves.
“We just randomly chose them. Most of the people that we chose, I tried to get most of the people were slaves. The other people were people that actually paid money to have their ancestor put on the monument. So some of those people were people that were born after 1900,” Campbell said.
It’s a way of saying these people, the lives they lived and their families matter. Campbell hopes that the progress they’ve made here is never lost again.
“This is remarkable. I mean, this is absolutely outstanding. We need to keep it going because if we don't, we're going to be back in the same situation we were when it first started. We don’t want to be in that situation,” Campbell said.
The monument dedication at Wilkins Cemetery in Dunn is planned for Sunday at 3 p.m.
Campbell is also working on creating a guide to the cemetery that will feature history and the names of people whose graves they’ve identified.