Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 25, 1994 TAG: 9406280093
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER NOTE: below
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Drivers zip by a block of woods in Northwest Roanoke every day, unaware of who rests deep within the thicket of locust trees, Virginia creeper and poison ivy.
Lying in the forest are the bodies of an estimated 1,000 fathers, grandmothers, great-grandparents and other kin of the black families of Roanoke.
They have rested there in relative peace for decades; but, two weeks ago, the graveyard was auctioned off .
Now, much of black Roanoke is up in arms about what will come of the place where their families are buried.
Eighty-year-old Thomas Noell's parents, a son, a brother, a sister, his mother-in-law and two brothers-in-law are buried in Springwood Burial Park.
He used to hack at the weeds and keep the way clear so people could visit the graves. Eventually, it became a forest-something only bush hogs and chain saws could tame, not one old man, not even one as strong as Tom Noell.
People quit coming to the cemetery, even Noell. ``Them copperheads in there will ruin you,'' he says.
In the last 30 years, Springwood Burial Park grew into a forest. Noell said drug dealers began hiding from police in the underbrush. Tree limbs and old furniture were dumped there, blocking a road that circles inside the 11.5-acre tract.
Early this month, Noell saw an auction sign pop up alongside the property, adjacent to Lincoln Terrace Elementary School and the Lincoln Terrace public housing complex.
He went to the June 11 sale, held on a Saturday morning in a clearing at the cemetery's edge, not far from where his parents are buried.
Before the bidding, he quietly offered the owner, a man from Tennessee, $5,000 for the nearly 12 acres. The man said no.
Noell had tried to talk families he knew into forming a corporation to buy the graveyard and clean it up. But, he said, ``they don't have any money.''
So he stood by and watched as Roanoke merchant Joseph Abbott bought it for $20,000. No one bid against him.
Abbott is on a prolonged trip to Lebanon, according to an employee. She said she was under his orders not to answer questions about him.
But he reportedly told concerned families at the auction that he wants to build a convenience store at Liberty Road and Hunt Avenue, a busy corner of his new property.
Several people at the auction said Abbott promised he would not disturb the graves and that he would like to donate most of the land to the city.
Noell said Abbott offered to sell him the cemetery for what he paid for it. He said, ``You can have the whole thing,'' said Noell. ``Just let me have the corner.''
But Noell said that corner is close to his parents' graves, ``and nobody's going to step on my mother and my father.''
While looking for those graves Thursday, Noell encountered beer cans, a mattress, plastic bags of trash, broken glass, blackberry bushes, honeysuckle, a chair, a Futon and a bumper crop of poison ivy.
He found two marked graves: Josh Watkins, a World War I veteran, and Elmer Boyer, who died in 1948.
``I know there's more than a thousand people buried in here,'' Noell said. He was a building contractor for 56 years, putting up houses all over Roanoke, until retiring in December.
The burial park once was run by C.C. Williams, one of the best-known black funeral directors in Roanoke's history. He attracted investors to the cemetery, too, but it began to be neglected when Williams died in 1962.
His widow, 88-year-old Mary Williams, said this week her husband bought the land from some white men. Court records show he and some partners bought it from a local cemetery corporation in 1941.
Twenty years later, after her husband died, she tried to run the cemetery herself, but it was too much for her.
Then she moved away. The property passed on to her stepdaughter, then to a succession of people. Some were too old to deal with it; developers who bought it were stymied by the graves.
No one can disturb the graves without going through a lengthy legal process and, perhaps, an expensive relocation of the dead.
``You can't just go in, dig up bodies and toss them in a landfill,'' said Roanoke lawyer Ross Hart.
Susan Coles' mother is buried in Springwood Burial Park. So are her grandmother, her great-grandmother, a brother, a cousin and an uncle.
When Coles saw the sale sign early this month, ``to me, it didn't seem right - a cemetery being auctioned?''
She called cemetery owner Eugene Fields of Church Hill, Tenn. The state sold it to him for $15,000 in a 1992 escheat sale because, according to sources in the cemetery business, taxes on the property were overdue.
Fields didn't know there was a cemetery on the land when he bought it, his wife told Coles. She said he tried without success to get his money back.
There's more family history in that cemetery than a few books could tell. Elaine Ward's husband is buried there. And so are her sister's grandchildren - two toddler boys and a girl, all killed in a fire in the 1960s.
At the least, people wish the cemetery were cleaned up enough so they could visit the graves.
With two knee replacements, Ward can't hike into the woods to her graves. ``I think I'm going to have my husband moved,'' she said.
When her husband died in 1957, she bought four graves. She figures the three empty ones are worthless now.
Elizabeth Macklin's family bought the rights to 13 or 14 graves but used only five before things got bad. She wanted to bury her brother there in 1981, but the cemetery was too overgrown.
Families say they have records of their burial rights but they are still searching for a map of the graves. Without one, some will have trouble finding their kin.
Noell said Springwood graveholders have asked for a map for years and always got the runaround.
Even if a family locates its grave, it could cost hundreds of dollars to buy another grave somewhere else and pay for another burial.
For years, people in Roanoke's funeral-related businesses have avoided pleas to buy Springwood Burial Park. They see it as a tangle of physical and legal troubles.
``It would cost more to clean it up than it was worth,'' said C.J. Lynch, who bought and still runs C.C. Williams' other cemetery, C.C. Williams Memorial Park on Westside Boulevard Northwest.
Because of Springwood's condition, some couples can't be buried together. A woman wanted to join her husband in Springwood, but Lynch couldn't chop his way through the brush to bury her there. He can't even move the dead out anymore, as many families have requested.
``There are snakes over there as big as your arm,'' he said.
Lawrence Hamlar, president of Hamlar & Curtis Funeral Home, hasn't buried anyone there in years. ``I can't even see the ground,'' he said.
Tom Noell remembers when people brought flowers to Springwood's graves. Now, the only niceties are wildflowers.
He can name four men who, one after the other, lived in a house on the grounds. They dug and tended the graves.
Nearby, Noell recalled, was Springwood Park. It had a swimming pool, dances on a showboat and other recreation for black families.
He said Springwood Burial Park once was Roanoke's only private cemetery for blacks, unless they were members of Gainsboro's First Baptist Church and could be buried in its cemetery.
Noell has a relative who was buried in Springwood in 1938. He believes some graves are much older. He would like to see a monument in the middle of the graveyard to stand for all the tombstones now missing.
He wants to save the place, but he's not sure how.
``When you buy property in a cemetery anywhere, you don't buy the land,'' only burial rights, he said. ``You don't have a leg to stand on.
``I want to get back to talking to Joe [Abbott],'' he said, ``but I want to talk to the people. I started to go on and bid on that thing but my age got me.''
Noell watched years ago as construction of Interstate 581 in Roanoke went through Old Lick Cemetery. A newspaper story from 1961 said some of those graves dated to 1880.
Some were moved to other cemeteries. The rest remain in a patch of woods near where I-581 and Williamson Road come together.
``They're going to do the same thing here,'' Noell said Thursday, using an aluminum cane to fight his way through the weeds and underbrush at Springwood. ``That's why I'm raising so much hell. I don't want it to happen again.''
by CNB