STARKVILLE — Visiting Brush Arbor Cemetery on University Drive over the weekend, Mississippi State University anthropology professor Jordan Lynton Cox was disappointed in what she saw.
Starkville’s historic Black cemetery, a site of a field school supported by a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment of Humanities, was covered with litter.
“There were beer bottles and cans strewn all over the place,” Cox told The Dispatch. “My husband and I picked up an entire (garbage) bag full of waste that was left behind there.”
And that’s to say nothing of more natural canine waste typically found throughout the site.
“To me, personally, when we go out there on Veterans Day and put up flags, it’s embarrassing to see dog crap all over the graves,” said Chris Taylor, a military veteran and executive board member for the Oktibbeha County chapter of the NAACP.
Without the conspicuous sign for Brush Arbor posted by the street, the once abandoned cemetery almost disappears against the Cotton District aesthetic — squeezed between Scooter’s Records to the east and a fairly new apartment complex to the west. Both Taylor and Cox believe some type of fence is immediately needed to keep the two-acre site, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2014, from further degrading.
“I think one thing that really needs to be clarified are the borders of the site,” Cox said. “There is a lot of encroachment by buildings that are around it. A fence would help to stop people from walking their dogs, from littering and creating waste. I think even a temporary fence as a primary stopgap would be a very good idea.”
Taylor took that plea before the board of aldermen on Tuesday during citizens’ comments of its first October meeting. He didn’t get anywhere.
“We’re not going to put up a fence,” Mayor Lynn Spruill told The Dispatch on Wednesday. “None of our cemeteries have fences. We’ve taken fences down at other cemeteries. Why would we put one up at Brush Arbor?”
She noted Oddfellows Cemetery, located across University Drive from Brush Arbor, had its fence removed some time between 2005 and 2009, during Dan Camp’s mayoral administration.
“It is public property. It is a park, of a sort,” she said. “There is opportunity for access to that. I don’t have any particular sense of why we would restrict any access to the public. It would also make it more difficult to mow, but that’s neither here nor there.”
She said the “same dogs” do their business in both cemeteries, and while there is a city ordinance requiring owners to pick up after their pets, “there are not enough police officers in the world to police that.”
City involvement lacking?
The city took over maintenance of Brush Arbor about 10 years ago, Spruill said. A community effort in 2020 saw it added to several map apps.
MSU established the field school in March for the purpose of surveying, cataloging and researching what was once called the Starkville Colored Cemetery, then creating a digital archive to preserve the findings.
Cohorts of 10 students each will work with professors over three summers on the project, starting this year, Cox said, with each group producing a report that will be edited and upgraded. There is also a graduate and undergraduate student working with professors, including Cox, the project director, between summers.
So far, the team has identified 81 burials and 41 headstones at the site, the earliest dating back to 1882 and the latest recorded burial in 1954.
Researchers held two public meetings to provide updates on their findings after the first group’s work this summer, and Cox said another meeting is planned in the spring.
The first group’s report, which will give a historical overview of the cemetery and its “current status,” Cox said, should be publicly available this fall. On that report are measures that can be taken now to better preserve the physical site, including a fence, she said.
All of this should lead to a sustainable preservation plan at the end of the project, Cox said, which she believes the city should be “leading the charge to come up with and consult.”
“I would encourage the city and the aldermen, as the stewards of a place with national importance, to look further on ways they can elevate this site,” Cox said.
But outside of writing a letter of support for the project to go with the NEH grant application, Cox said city officials have not been engaged. Though she said they had been invited, none had attended the community meetings this summer.
Spruill said she wasn’t aware before Tuesday of any invitations to events or extra help for the project that had been requested from the city. She said the city oversees mowing at the cemetery and had also repaired a headstone there recently. Beyond basic maintenance, there is nothing more in the budget.
“We are happy to support their efforts of investigating the cemetery and its history,” Spruill said. “I understand they are looking for grants and we’re happy to be supportive in that way. … We look forward to whatever report they provide us.”
Friends of the Cemetery
The project works with 13 community partners — a few churches, the NAACP and the Starkville Oktibbeha Unity League among them.
Cox also wants the community to establish a Friends of the Cemetery nonprofit that could raise funds and apply for grants for site preservation.
Cox said her group isn’t the first to try to help the cemetery. Past efforts have made a little progress before disappearing because of a lack of sustained community commitment.
“That is something we are very worried about,” she said.
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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