By: Rafael Alvarez


Graveyard shift: Prison laborers outfitted with machetes have helped clear overgrown Mount Auburn Cemetery, the city’s first African American burial ground. | photo by Michael Northrup


The names speak from gravestones across a gnarled hilltop like characters in a blues opera:

Emanuel Snell, husband of the young Ruby.

Maggie Valentine.

Bessie Mae Hythe.

Almeater Watson, who met his Maker on July 13, 1962.

Have you yet to encounter a soul named Almeater?

If not for months of hard labor by inmates wielding machetes as though the corner of Annapolis Road and Waterview Avenue were the Amazon, one might have searched the grounds of Mount Auburn Cemetery for days without encountering Mr. Watson or hundreds of his subterranean neighbors. The oldest African American burial ground in the metropolitan area and a National Register of Historic Places landmark, this Westport graveyard—originally known as the “City of the Dead for Colored People”—is the final resting place for a host of celebrated black Baltimoreans, from slaves who took northbound rides to freedom on the Underground Railroad to Afro-American newspaper founder John Henry Murphy. Mount Auburn has also been, for decades, a botanical nightmare, its tombstones enveloped in a wild morass of timber, trash, rampant overgrowth, and tangled vines as thick as hawser line. The fence around the cemetery was cut, rusting to pieces, and falling down. Dogs and rodents scavenged unhindered for God knows what, roots had pushed some coffins up toward the sod, and security was nonexistent.

In the match between Mother Nature and the Sharp Street United Methodist Church, which has owned Mount Auburn since the cemetery’s founding in 1868, nature had long been declared the victor. The congregation didn’t have the funds to put more than a dent in maintaining the nearly 33-acre grounds, long relying on volunteers to “bring lawn equipment,” as a sign on a graveyard shed suggested.

“I’ve cut a lot of grass, and I’ve cut down a lot of trees,” says Clarence Wayman, a member of the Mount Auburn board of directors and the man in charge of the current landscaping project—a job so long overdue he expects it to cost some $2 million.

The work started last September, when a truckload of short-timers from a Department of Corrections boot camp in Jessup began showing up at Mount Auburn with machetes and an unarmed guard. The prison labor is gratis, part of a public service program instituted by Maryland Secretary of Public Safety and Corrections Gary D. Maynard. The outreach includes work at military cemeteries in Crownsville, Garrison Forest, and Cheltenham, as well as planting trees and general neighborhood cleanup.


Groundskeepers: Cornelius Woodson, director of the Department of Corrections program that sends inmates to work on public service projects, admires his prisoners’ handiwork at Mount Auburn. | photo by Michael Northrup


Asked if unrestrained prisoners brandishing 2-foot machete blades should give the public pause, Cornelius Woodson, the director of the inmate program, compares them to similar inmates—those on good behavior not long from release—working in kitchens with knives. “Our inmates are bringing the cemetery back to life,” he says, with neither pun nor irony. “These guys are minimum-security inmates without much time left on their sentence. We believe they are trustworthy.”

Apparently so does the Sharp Street congregation, established between Pratt and Lombard streets in 1787 as the first African American Methodist church in Baltimore. Sharp Street’s Rev. Douglas Sands, father of current pastor Rev. Dellyne Hinton, bought most of the machetes that help expedite the seemingly endless bushwacking. On the church’s “Mount Auburn Day” in November, inmates were invited to church and received certificates of appreciation. Some of the prisoners’ families received gifts from the church at Christmas.

Since work began, Sharp Street’s Wayman has been trying to locate his kin—Caroline County cousins several times removed named Bessie and Arthur Chapman, buried some half-century ago and now lost in the weeds. But so far they have eluded him. “I hoped I might just stumble upon them,” Wayman says. Soon perhaps—after a commercial landscaping firm is brought in. “First we had to clear the land,” Wayman says. “Then we’ll go to grading and stump grinding. When all of that’s done, we’ll have to find the money to fix the fence.”

This summer, volunteers from Morgan State University are joining the rescue effort. Students from the schools of engineering and architectural design will research cemetery records and use sonar to help align markers with the proper graves. It won’t be foolproof—for that there would have to be exhumation—but it will be a big step in the right direction.

Right now, the most impressive and easily accessed grave at Mount Auburn is that of Joe Gans, the “Old Master” who held the world lightweight boxing title from 1902 through 1904 and again from 1906 to 1908. Just inside the main Waterview Avenue entrance at the corner of Nevada Street, Gans’ marker was restored in 2005 by the International Boxing Hall of Fame, to which the Baltimorean was inducted in 1990. It’s a monument worthy of a champion lauded by boxing historian Nat Fleischer as the greatest lightweight of all time.

Not so with Anthony L. Brown, born in 1953 and deceased a mere nineteen years later. Tony Brown was one of the great Dunbar High School basketball players and a member of the Poets’ 1971–72 team, which went undefeated in his senior year. He received offers from most of the major basketball colleges in the country, including UCLA, only to be stabbed to death by a girlfriend before choosing a school. He is buried beneath a couple of short two-by-fours nailed into a cross, painted white and inscribed in black marker: Anthony L. Brown, 11.18.53 – 03.28.72 – Better Known as ‘Tony the Tiger.’ Dunbar Basketball Star.

Below the newly cleared ground, entwined with Tony and Almeater and Bessie and the rest of these very quiet Baltimoreans of color, lie Mount Auburn’s annual enemies: the deep roots of honeysuckle, poison ivy, thistle, small trees, and other assorted brush, all waiting for the warming earth to send forth new growth and reclaim their territory.

“Spring beats death,” Thomas Wolfe once wrote, a seasonal verity that Mount Auburn will try to defy this year. Workers from the Maryland Department of Agriculture have applied a cascade of herbicide to beat back the brush. Soon, says Woodson, “You’ll be able to tell it’s a cemetery again.”

—Rafael Alvarez




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