Workers with the Siloam Presbyterian Church Cemetery Beautification Project located 190 unmarked grave sites in northeast Charlotte. A Boone-based company, Seramur and Associates, brought in to assist with the project, used ground-penetrating radar at Siloam Cemetery Friday morning to detail the locations of the graves.
The Siloam Presbyterian Church once stood near the cemetery, located on Ridge Road. The church was destroyed by a fire in 1958. The restoration effort began four years ago to preserve the grounds and honor the families of those buried there.
Family members were in attendance during the process, including Denise Turner, who recently returned to Charlotte. Tuner's great-grandparents, Frank and Amanda Lee, are buried in the cemetery. She said she wishes the sites were initially marked correctly.
"I don't know how things were done back then, but it just appears that when someone is placed in a grave, that those graves should have been marked at that time," Turner said.
Project leader Paula Williams says her cousin encouraged her to visit the cemetery after years of neglect had left the site overgrown and falling apart. Since then, new fencing has been installed, and the grass has been kept trimmed. But Williams recently found a rotted tree that smashed the bench near her grandparents’ graves.
Williams says she’s tried contacting a nearby property owner about the trees, but hasn’t had much luck.
"I did suggest that he come out and trim the trees back because now this is not the first time a tree has fallen," Williams said.
"This is about the third or fourth time, and as you can see, a lot of those trees are rotten, and it has also not damaged the fence just here, but up at the top of the east side, it damaged the fence there because the tree fell, and one fell over here last year and damaged other properties."
Williams says the project’s main focus is identifying as many family members as possible through records such as obituaries, names and birth certificates.
