Anderson Wright was just a little boy when he began cleaning graves at Oxford Cemetery, his small but sure hands pulling up weeds and brushing away debris.
“I grew up helping my grandmother and her sister, who were always over there cleaning up the gravesites of our family members and other people we knew,” he said. “For a long time, they didn’t keep good records [of the gravesites], but they taught me where people were buried.” His deep respect for preserving history grew over the years, as he joined the military, attended college and worked in California. “Sometimes, I would come home on leave or vacation,” he said, “and the cemetery was so grown up that you couldn’t find one grave from another.”
Wright’s cemetery knowledge proved vital when he moved back to Oxford after retirement from the United States Postal Service and the Navy Reserves. “Some family members may be looking for a grave but don’t even know if the family owned a plot,” he said, “or the city may not have a deed, but I can tell them where to find the grave.” He now serves as president of the Oxford Historical Cemetery Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded in 1965 to support the City of Oxford’s efforts to beautify and maintain the cemetery grounds.
“You don’t see any headstones in the northern section they call the slave section.”
Anderson Wright
Many graves of historic significance are located there, including those of Methodist Church bishops, Emory College presidents and faculty members. However, perhaps its most poignant acreage holds the largely unmarked graves of at least 1,000 slaves. “You don’t see any headstones in the northern section they call the slave section,” Wright said. “Some people say they couldn’t afford headstones, and that may be true in a way but not entirely. Some headstones were there, but they were broken. We were able to put some of them back together again.” One of the oldest repaired headstones belonged to Rev. Y. Potter, a Methodist minister who lived from 1812 to 1851.
For most of the cemetery’s existence, segregation has been clearly drawn within its borders, with the northern side designated for African Americans and the southern side for whites. Wright has worked to change people’s perception of the cemetery into one integrated space.
“The previous lawn maintenance crew would cut a certain side first, allowing the other to overgrow,” he said. “I rewrote the contract so that both sides are cut at once.” Wright also refers to the cemetery’s sections by directional names instead of calling them black or white. “New plots,” he said, “aren’t divided like that.” One of Wright’s major projects involved partnering with Rev. Tom Johnson, a now-deceased Methodist minister. “We worked together to get a company to do radar penetration to find out exactly where unmarked graves were located. They found and marked many graves and made a map of them. I also encourage people to put a permanent marker on their loved one’s grave as soon as they can. The free markers the funeral home uses don’t last long.”
Wright hopes to inspire younger generations to take over the meaningful work of historic cemetery preservation, emphasizing that such care has no end date. “There’s still a lot of work to be done,” he said. Oxford College students, Boy Scout troops and other groups have volunteered in the past, their youthful hands performing the same tasks Wright’s did when he was their age.
For information on the Oxford Historical Cemetery Foundation, visit oxfordgeorgia.org/OxfordHistorical
CemeteryFoundation.aspx
Click here to read more stories by Kari Apted.
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