Dorothy S. Rcdford (right), retiring site manager
at Somerset Place State Historic Site, speaks
with participants of a weeklong teachers
institute at the site in July.
history of Somerset Place. Over the years,
Redford oversaw the reconstruction of two
homes for enslaved people, including that
of matriarch Suky Davis. She also recon¬
structed the enslaved community’s hospital.
As a result, the site can boast of having the
only interpreted slave hospital anywhere in
the United States.
Dot Redford’ s colleagues in the Office
of Archives and History will miss her and
wish her a happy retirement. They agree
with Senator Marc Basnight, who recently
told the Virginia Pilot , “She brought credibility, passion, and a deep concern for the history'
of American plantation life. Because of her, Somerset is alive.”
New Program Created to Save Abandoned Cemeteries
To address a growing public concern for the plight of North Carolina’s abandoned and
forgotten cemeteries, the Office of Archives and History has created the Cemetery Survey
and Stewardship Program, a collaborative effort between the Archives and Records Sec¬
tion and the Office of State Archaeology. Program staff members are Mary Hollis Barnes,
an archivist who serves as the program’s coordinator, and Roderick Kevin Donald, an
archaeologist. State funding for the program was recommended by a sixteen-member
legislative study committee in December 2006. The committee also advocated changes to
several general statutes concerning cemeteries, which were enacted into law in June 2007.
The Cemetery Survey and Stewardship Program builds upon many years of cemetery
recording efforts at the federal, state, and local levels. In the 1930s, the federally funded
Works Progress Administration conducted cemetery surveys in North Carolina, mainly
targeting tombstone inscriptions that dated prior to 1914 in order to capture information
concerning deaths that occurred before the adoption of a statewide death certificate sys¬
tem. In 1978, a legislative Abandoned Cemetery Study Committee was established to
address concerns for neglected cemeteries. The result was the hiring of a part-time coordi¬
nator to work with selected county committees in carrying out local surveys. As groups in
other counties learned of the pilot project, they also became involved in surveying their
own cemeteries. However, in 1981, the funding for the part-time coordinator position
ended, and county cemetery committees were left without dedicated centralized
supervision from the State.
During the past twenty-four years, much of the survey and stewardship of cemeteries
has fallen upon local historical and genealogical organizations or individual volunteers.
Much of the recording of cemeteries has been done by private professional archaeological
consultants who have produced a variety of reports, many of which are on file in the
Office of State Archaeology. Many of the issues regarding the survey and stewardship of
cemeteries at the state level were assumed by employees of the Office of Archives and
History, who handled cemetery-related duties in addition to their primary responsibilities.
As of 2002, only seventeen counties had completely surveyed their local cemeteries and
deposited the data in the State Archives. Many of the local coordinators and groups have
since discontinued their efforts altogether.
As a first step towards addressing this situation, the program’s staff members have sent
questionnaires to more than 230 organizations to gather information regarding the current
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