BLUEFIELD, Va. —
One of the final vestiges of the Jim Crow era in Bluefield, Va., will soon only be a memory thanks to the efforts of the Bluefield, Va., administration and town council.
On Thursday evening, July 12, representatives of the town appeared before the Tazewell County Planning Commission to receive a gift of 3.99 acres of land outside the town limits that had been used as a cemetery for African American families who lived in the community from the late 19th century until approximately the late 1940s or ‘50s when that portion of the cemetery was no longer used and became overgrown.
“Our plan is to wait until the fall when the leaves are off the trees, and start restoring it,” Mike Watson, Bluefield, Va., town manager said. “This is a really good thing. We’re planning to cut about 70 percent of the trees off the lot, but leave a few to make it aesthetically appealing. After we reset all of the stones and mark the graves that are unmarked, we want to put a walking area in there where people can come and pay their respects.”
Black families of Bluefield, Va., started using the Oak Grove Cemetery some time in the 1930s, but no one knows for sure why the town abandoned that section of the town-owned cemetery. Town councils of the 1980s discussed restoring the black section of the cemetery when approached by some leading citizens from the black community, but the idea never got past the discussion stage.
In the fall of 2005, a racially diverse group of volunteers who had started restoring the long neglected Oak Grove Cemetery in Bluewell, committed a well-publicized act of civil disobedience by entering town property and cutting down some of the trees and removing some of the topsoil that had been dumped over the fence that separated white burials and black burials after death.
The town council, under the leadership of then Town Manager Todd Day, took the initiative to remove the fence and clear and restore the small portion of the cemetery that was within the town limits. And Watson as well as Maple Hill Cemetery manager Jody Shrewsbury, continued to work on the possibility to finish the project.
Derrill Douthat had owned the property without knowing it was a cemetery, according to Cody Musick, zoning administrator for the Town of Bluefield, Va. “Mr. Douthat donated that property to the town, saying that it should be properly maintained,” Musick said. “The deed has been signed. Everybody I’ve talked to about this project say it will make a wrong a right,” he said. “There are a lot of the descendants of the people who were buried there who still live in Bluefield, Va. A lot of the names are the same as the names of people still living here.”
Musick said that he and Shrewsbury have walked the property to determine the size and scope of the cemetery. “We think we know the size of it,” he said. “We’ll wait until the fall before we start on it, but we are ready to get started.”
Watson said that the town has the resources to transform the long-neglected portion of the cemetery into a place that the entire community can be proud of.
— Contact Bill Archer at barcher@bdtonline.com
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