SALISBURY — Not far from Salisbury National Cemetery, hundreds of people were laid to rest with far less fanfare. However, the work of the Dixonville-Lincoln Memorial Task Force aimed to ensure those lives were not forgotten to history.

On Wednesday, former mayor Susan Kluttz joined the project’s chairman, Emily Perry, for a tour of the cemetery and the memorial that was constructed to honor the names of the buried. 

Dixonville Cemetery is in the 100 block of Old Concord Road, near the Fred Evans Pool. It was once the focal point of the East End community before 1960s-era urban renewal efforts drastically altered the area’s makeup.

Initially, there were only 18 identifiable graves, but years of research by the task force led to the documentation of 530 burials. Perry said they believe there could be as many as 500 more yet to be identified. 

“There are still more,” Perry said. “We don’t want to fool ourselves.”

Compiling the names was a Herculean effort that required many hands on deck. 

“I give a lot of credit to Betty Dan Spencer,” Perry said. “She did a lot of the research along with several other people. She went into people’s homes and into churches. We asked people if they knew of anyone who might be buried there.”

The research was conducted anecdotally. No actual bodies were exhumed for identification purposes.

In September, memorial monuments were unveiled that bore the names of the 530 people who were identified through the research. The pillars line the sidewalk alongside Old Concord Road. 

What now stands as a testament to the dead in Dixonville Cemetery was once but a dream of a few determined individuals who identified a need during a clean-up project. 

“When we originally started, it was supposed to be to clean up the cemetery (because) it was a disaster,” Perry said. “In the process of cleaning, that is when we realized it was a graveyard as old as 1851.”

The grave site of Mary Valentine, dated 1851, revealed just how old the cemetery was. 

“It took an enormous amount of research,” Perry said. “You can imagine over 14 years trying to put this together.”

Kluttz was the mayor during the time the task force was commissioned.

“Through her administration with the city, she was determined that we needed to work on this project,” Perry said.” William Peoples was vigilant working with her, and so was Fred Evans. (Evans) was the one who really, really worked with Mayor Kluttz to get this thing going.”

During the process, Evans died.

“Before he passed, he asked if I would take over and continue the project,” Perry said. 

Having had a hand in the project left Perry “tearful.”

“Before now, people did not know (the names of the buried),” Perry said. “Folks that live here were not even aware that they had relatives. That is why we spent so much time going into churches and homes and events, just asking people to tell us what their story was. It’s very touching that through the years, this is what we ended up with.

“I don’t think the words can describe it. It’s like finding an aunt or uncle that you never knew.”

On one of the pillars is an infant Wright. 

“I had just been working on the project, and then I saw that name,” Perry said. “It’s my dad’s last name. When I started researching, I found out that it was my grandfather’s daughter from 1916.”

Dixonville Cemetery and Lincoln School

For years before urban renewal, paths crisscrossed the cemetery that led students from the East End community to Lincoln School, the first school for Black children in Salisbury. 

Those footsteps were lost in the renewal efforts as the connecting bridge was removed and the creek piped over. 

“City leaders at that time felt that a wonderful thing to do for this neighborhood would be to take down all the houses and structures and replace them with something new,” Kluttz said. “My understanding, and I was not a part of it then, is that there were dirt floors. Bathroom facilities weren’t inside houses. It was very primitive. My understanding is that the city leaders felt like they were doing people in this neighborhood a favor, to replace what they had with something new.”

Despite those intentions, Perry said that city leaders overlooked the consequences that the community would bear during the process.

“They did not look at the human aspect of what was going to take place because it wasn’t just homes and families,” Perry said. “There were businesses that were destroyed.”

Perry mentioned that poorer families were forced to move, and the community’s identity suffered. A key element of that loss was the school building. 

“We all went to Lincoln School,” Perry said. “That school was like our heartbeat. A lot of those teachers would come into our community to help parents learn how to read and write so they could help their children.”

Kluttz said that during her administration (1997-2011), she began to see the impact that her predecessors’ decisions had wrought on the community. Improving race relations became a priority for her. What would unfold opened her eyes in ways she could not originally have predicted. 

“In doing this project, I experienced such raw emotion,” Kluttz said. “I didn’t really understand until I experienced it.”

She offered as an example a consideration by a parks and recreation committee to take away the Fred Evans Pool after it was determined to require such extensive repairs as to make that option unfeasible. When word circulated, the community stepped up and pleaded for the city not to take away another part of the East End. 

Kluttz acknowledged that work still needs to be done. 

“My feeling with race relations is that I don’t want to stop until racism ends,” Kluttz said. “I was told by somebody that I was unrealistic. I said, ‘I don’t care, that’s what I want.’ But it’s going to be difficult. People here have so many memories of their parents and grandparents and so much pain from that that when you even bring up something, they have a different perspective.

As the former mayor put it, memorializing the cemetery was a huge step toward repairing damaged race relations. 

“The community said, ‘This is important to us,'” Kluttz said. “As far as I am concerned, it was one of the most important things we had to do as a community.”