There are 10,000 graves at Winston-Salem's Odd Fellows Cemetery. Group continues work to preserve them.

About 104 years later, in 2007, Henry Stepp became the last.

In between, nearly 10,000 Black Winston-Salem residents were buried at the cemetery off Shorefair Drive, between Senior Services Inc. and Pine Hall Brick Co.

Stepp was a former president of Friends of Odd Fellows Cemetery Inc., which has worked to bring the cemetery back to its former glory.

“Over the years, the cemetery fell into disarray and nobody took care of it,” said James Clyburn, the current president of the Friends group. “The younger people — the grandsons and the granddaughters — and some sons and daughters just lost interest.

“You couldn’t get into to it because the grass overgrew the cemetery. They were scared to come in and walk in, so they put in the back of their minds.”

As the leader of Friends group, though, Clyburn has come to know a lot about the people there.

They come from all walks of life: formerly enslaved people, veterans, business leaders and regular folks, along with babies buried in unmarked graves.

“I’ve got books at home, so when people come, I can talk about their loved ones at the gravesites,” Clyburn said.

Some of Winston-Salem’s most prominent Black leaders are buried in the cemetery, including George Hill, a founder of the Winston Mutual Life Insurance Co. and the Rev. R.L. File, the pastor at Mount Zion Baptist Church and namesake of the street on which the church sits, according to the Forsyth County Historic Resources Commission.

Clyburn, 82, mentioned the 100 or so veterans who are buried at Odd Fellows, fighters from the Spanish American War to the Vietnam War

Among them is Pfc. John Hickman, a member of the 10th Cavalry of the U.S. Army and also known as the Buffalo soldiers; Pvt. Morris L. Slaughter, who was killed in action in World War I, and Army Lt. Spurgeon Neal Ellington, a Tuskegee airman who was born in 1919 in Winston-Salem.

Ellington, 36, who survived combat missions with the 99th Fighter Squadron, was killed in a training exercise at Crystal Lake, Ga. in December 1945.

The Black veterans were eligible for government-paid plots in military cemeteries, but their families had already bought plots at Odd Fellows, Clyburn said.

Odd Fellow’s long history and those who are buried there are part of the history of Winston-Salem, Clyburn said. For that reason, he said, people should know about the cemetery and the efforts to preserve it.

Clyburn has a personal connection to the cemetery. In 1943, his grandfather paid $43 for a plot large enough for his family, which included 11 children.

So far, six of his grandfather’s children, including Clyburn’s father, rest in Odd Fellows, Clyburn said.

“That’s the reason I got interested in the upkeep of the cemetery,” he said.

Long history

The Odd Fellows Cemetery is one of 20 cemeteries throughout Forsyth County that are connected to African Americans, said Michelle McCullough, a project planner and historic resources officer with the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Historic Commission.

Those include Evergreen Cemetery off New Walkertown Road, the St. Philips Moravian Second Graveyard in Old Salem, the Silver Hill Cemetery and the Happy Hill cemetery, as well as various Black church cemeteries and family plots, McCullough said.

The Winston Star Lodge and the Twin City Lodge, two African-American fraternal organizations, initially bought the 10-acre site for a cemetery in 1911 for Black residents amid the segregation era, Clyburn said.

Phorest Hampton was already buried at the site, which was part of a community known as “Grunt Town.” The area took its name from the pigs that were raised near the fairgrounds, Clyburn said. There was a baseball field in the area as well.

The cemetery now covers about 12½ acres.

“They left it in the trusted hands of the Odd Fellows and the Winston Star and Twin City lodges,” Clyburn said.

In the 1944, the New Evergreen Cemetery opened off of New Walkertown Road in Winston-Salem. Many Black families decided to bury their loved ones there rather than in Old Fellows, beginning a slow decline at the Odd Fellows site.

In the 1950s, conditions at the cemetery became a public-health hazard after dogs dragged bones from exposed graves.

Efforts were made through the years to clean up the cemetery, but many people with relatives buried there either didn’t know their family members were there or they were discouraged from visiting by the woods and thick overgrowth.

In 1997, the Odd Fellows Reclamation Project was formed to clean up the cemetery. That group evolved into the Friends of Odd Fellows. Since 2008, the Friends’ group has worked to restore the cemetery.

In May 2010, the Forsyth County Historic Resources Commission placed a historic marker at the cemetery’s entrance on Shorefair Drive.

“The marker will never be able to tell the real stories of the people that are resting there, but it does ensure that this place is never forgotten and protected,” said Mayor Pro Tem D.D. Adams. “Our history in the city has been removed in so many ways.

“Because of things done in the past, it’s important to me for the city to continue to record African-American history of the past, future and present,” said Adams, who represents the North Ward on the Winston-Salem City Council.

For several years, the Friends’ group has organized regular service days with volunteers who cut back the brush and remove trash from the cemetery.

The Winston-Salem Foundation announced Jan. 23 that it had awarded the Friends of the Odd Fellows Cemetery a $50,000 grant to make safety and accessibility upgrades throughout the cemetery.

The grant money will pay to improve the driveway and roads within the cemetery, install a gravel parking lot, add lights around the cemetery’s caretaker house and the site’s driveway and key locations within the cemetery, said Greg Errett, the financial analyst for the Friends’ organization.

The Friends’ group also has applied for a grant to the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington, D.C. to pay for other projects in the cemetery, Errett said.

That work would consist of using Ground Penetrating Radar to look for graves, restoring trails and walking paths in the cemetery and repairing the concrete and brick boundaries around the burial plots, Errett said.

“A lot of those have deteriorated through the years,” Errett said. “We want to restore some of those as we much as we can.”

The work also would improve signs in the cemetery to guide visitors safely around the site, Errett said.

The Friends’ group hopes that its efforts will help future generations to maintain the cemetery, Errett said.

“It’s hard to tell people where to find their loved ones’ graves if we can’t find their headstones,” Errett said.

More research under way

Terry Brock, the director of Cultural Heritage and Archaeology Research Group at Wake Forest University, is leading a research project at the cemetery. Brock also is the manager of archaeology and research at the Wake Forest Historical Museum and a research associate with the Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies Program at WFU.

The research group is working with the Friends’ organization to create a Geographic Information System to help the descendants identify the people buried in the Odd Fellows Cemetery and their headstones, Brock wrote recently in an article on the Wake Forest website.

“Most importantly, it will help to restore the humanity and dignity to the thousands of people who were buried in the cemetery,” Brock wrote.

About 150 volunteers came to the cemetery on Jan. 16, the national holiday for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., to clean up the cemetery, Clyburn said.

The Friends’ group had canceled previous King Day cleaning projects at the site because of the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.

On the third Saturdays in every month, the Friends’ group and volunteers gather at the cemetery to remove trash, debris and undergrowth from the site, Clyburn said.

They work for about four hours during those days.

“We try to do as much as we can,” Clyburn said.

The cleanup work is constant because there are more than 300 deciduous trees within the cemetery, Errett said. Those trees shed their leaves every fall and winter onto the cemetery, creating debris for volunteers to remove, he said.

Important historic site

The Odd Fellows Cemetery is an important historic site in Winston-Salem, Adams said.

“While growing up in Winston-Salem, my parents and the community always told the stories of our history,” Adams said. “(They were) about cemeteries or the tearing down of our neighborhoods.

“They wanted to make sure that we knew so we would never forget. Whether it was the cemeteries in Happy Hill, Odd Fellows or Evergreen, it was not unusual for my parents to visit these holy grounds.”

Adams grew up in a home on Okalina Avenue, about a mile from Odd Fellows.

After Adams was elected to the city council in 2009, Clyburn spoke with her about the cemetery’s condition.

Clyburn took Adams on a tour, “and I saw the need to help and try to improve its appearance,” Adams said. “There were concerns that the grounds were unkept and overgrown.

“There was vandalism and trash due to people using the cemetery for dumping,” Adams said. “It wasn’t as secure as it should be for a cemetery.”

Adams asked city officials to do what was needed to protect the cemetery with its “rich history from being further decimated,” she said.

The city helped with some fences at the cemetery and other measures to improve its appearance, Adams said.

Odd Fellows is a part of the city’s history, Clyburn said, and city residents should know about it.

Over the years, many, including local college and high school students, have come over to help clear debris at Odd Fellows.

When Clyburn first took over the group, he would walk through the cemetery and talk to the Lord, “saying that ‘we don’t have enough money or the people, but you do.’ That turned things around.”