South Asheville Cemetery: an historical site worth seeking out
Off the map and out of the way of most tourist-oriented tours is one of the more historically significant spots in the whole of North Carolina, at the John A. Baptist church property in the Kenilworth neighborhood of Asheville. Behind this small and simple wooden church built in the mid 1800s is a small tract of land of about 4 acres, where in the late 1800s and the early 1900s, slaves, Indians, and other poor and disenfranchised persons were buried in the so called “slave cemetery” of south Asheville. But the burial ground, where people who were so poor that their families could not afford to bury them in standard caskets or with tombstone markers, does not look like others you may be familiar with and can be easy to miss. Disguised as it is in the wooded area, it can be altogether overlooked unless you realize that when these people died their resting places were only marked by a planted tree or a placed natural rock. Now, more than 100 years since the cemetery was at its peak of usage, the ground is swollen with heaved clay from the shifting earth, and the former field is now a wooded area of pines and oaks. Here and there a tombstone can be found, but most of the markers of graves have become the trees that are now mature and form the woods where the cemetery lies. Perhaps someday, with enough attention from the interested public, the place will finally be declared a protected historical site by the local and state governments.