Elmwood Pinewood Cemetery (Charlotte, North Carolina)

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www.cmhpf.org/Surveys&relmwood.htm

Elmwood Cemetery is a property that possesses local historic significance as one of the oldest and largest public cemeteries in Charlotte and as a reflection of Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s nineteenth-and-twentieth-century cultural heritage.1 The cemetery, a 72-acre plot of rolling green space in the heart of Charlotte, first opened in 1853. Some of Charlotte’s most important citizens purchased family plots during the late 1800s and early 1900s, and Elmwood now contains the remains of such men as developer Edward Dilworth Latta, textile entrepreneur D. A. Tompkins, former Charlotte mayor S. S. McNinch, and W. W. Smith, Charlotte’s first black architect. The graves of such important Charlotte-Mecklenburg citizens, alongside the thousands of others who lived, worked, worshipped and died in Mecklenburg County, make Elmwood an important historical and cultural resource. The intricacies of the gravestones themselves, the arrangement of family members within a plot and of plots within the cemetery, all give clues to the values and beliefs of specific persons within the Charlotte community and of the community as a whole.

Elmwood Cemetery is also significant as an integral part of the center city’s urban landscape. Like many urban cemeteries in the nineteenth century, Elmwood served as a place of respite for the living as well as the dead. Elmwood’s strategic location and neatly kept, shady lawns attracted many Charlotteans looking for a place in town to take their family walks and Sunday picnics. As one of the only green spaces remaining in the heart of center city Charlotte, Elmwood still serves as a place for residents and workers seeking relief from the noise and bustle of the city.

Elmwood Cemetery also serves as a representation of the increasing racial, ethnic, and socio-economic diversity of a New South city throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries while remaining a tangible reminder of the system of segregation that characterized the South until the middle of the twentieth century. Although the graves of African Americans and Confederate veterans, Charlotte’s poorest citizens along with many of its wealthiest, are all included among those interred at Elmwood, the separation of black and white graves into two completely segregated cemeteries (Elmwood was white, Pinewood, black, physically separated by a chain fence) made the Elmwood Cemetery complex the center of a controversial local civil rights campaign during the late 1960s.