Cemetery Preservation Project Honors Historic Black Church in Grier Heights

In a wooded area behind the Wallace Terrace Apartments in east Charlotte’s Grier Heights neighborhood, there’s a man who’s been working on a grave for weeks.

Now 72 years old, Wayne Johnson has been coming to the grave of his great-grandfather Nelson Walker since he was 5 years old, when his dad would walk him and his brothers from their home on Ellington Street to the cemetery at St. Lloyd Presbyterian Church.

“We started to come up and clean up my father’s grandfather’s grave and his grandmother’s grave every year,” Johnson recalled on a recent cold November morning at the site. “Every different holiday, Christmas, Mother’s Day, all those days we was here cleaning up.”

The church, originally founded in 1868 by formerly enslaved residents living near Sharon Township in what is now the SouthPark area, had moved to Grier Heights in the 1920s as that neighborhood became a bustling Black community.

The church closed in 1966 and has long since been demolished. The St. Lloyd Presbyterian Church Cemetery became overgrown, but longtime residents like Wayne Johnson, referred to in the community as members of the “Legacy Family,” never forgot it.

His work to restore the grave of Nelson Walker is a personal passion project of his, but it’s also part of a larger project to preserve the St. Lloyd cemetery. That’s the mission of the St. Lloyd Presbyterian Church Cemetery Foundation (SLPCCF), formed in 2023 to honor the legacy of the historic Black church by preserving cemetery sites that remain in its original SouthPark location as well as Grier Heights.

That mission marks a milestone on Nov. 12 when Johnson and fellow members of the SLPCCF gather at the site to celebrate the official transfer of ownership of the property into their hands.

Working simultaneously at the SouthPark site off Colony Road, where the foundation has identified 184 grave sites, and the Grier Heights site, which holds 62 graves, the foundation aims to build parks that will serve both as memorials to those ancestors who were laid to rest there and as community gathering spots.

Renderings of the park planned for Grier Heights by local urban design and land planning firm LandDesign show boardwalks and pedestrian paths cutting through the wooded area, with rounded structures and seating areas located in the middle.

“Envision vibrant colors flowing brightly in energizing whimsical circles and spheres that incorporate a seeds of growth theme,” reads the SLPCCF website.

When it does come to fruition, the property will provide a lasting legacy not only for Johnson and his team but the ancestors and community members who came before them.

A church is raised

In October 1867, a group of African-American members of Sharon Presbyterian Church in what was then known as Sharon Township in south Charlotte appeared before the Church Elders and requested “advice and aid in building a house of worship for the colored people,” according to the minutes from that session.

The names of the petitioners are lost to time, but it is believed that they became the founders of St. Lloyd Presbyterian Church.

On Feb. 18, 1868, five trustees of The Presbytery of Catawba of the United Presbyterian Church of America signed a deed to purchase a single acre of land in Sharon Township for $25, on which to erect the congregation’s first church building and create a burial ground. Later on, a primary school was also established on the property.

In the mid-1920s, former governor Cameron Morrison and his wife Sarah bought the land where the church was located.

The five trustees of St. Lloyd at the time — James Rodman, Hall Price, Thomas Knox, Walter Davis and Frank Price — moved the church to a new location on more than 2 acres that they bought from E.W Wallace and Katie C. Wallace, two members of the church who owned land in the nascent Black community Grier Heights.

Originally known as Grier Town, Grier Heights originated as a farming community comprising just four houses in 1886. It’s believed that Sam Billings, a formerly enslaved man whom Wayne Johnson proudly claims as a direct relative, became the first African-American to buy a plot of land in Charlotte when he purchased the 100 acres that would become the foundation of Grier Heights.

In 1907, Billings joined neighbors Arthur S. Grier, the funeral home director for whom the neighborhood was named; John Jackson; Lee Father MacDuff Dinkins; and Grier Heights’ Antioch Baptist Church founder James McVay to purchase more land and build the community farther out.

In 1927, around the same time St. Lloyd Presbyterian moved into the neighborhood, community members requested to have a school built. The local board of education agreed only to provide a frame structure for such an establishment, so neighbors donated land and built it themselves. That facility has since been turned into the Grier Heights Community Center, where residents can access low-cost medical care, adult literacy tutoring and GED classes.

In the 1940s, Grier built 100 homes that were sold to Black soldiers returning from World War II. Born in 1953, Johnson still takes pride in this spirit of neighbors helping neighbors.

“You can’t say there wasn’t any Blacks involved in this community as families,” he said when asked about the importance of preserving the story of Grier Heights’ beginnings. “All the guys, because they knew trades, they was helping each other … When they started to develop a community, everybody was happy to build up my house … We come in, we pitch in and we help you to build your house, and you get your house built, then somebody else come in and so on. Because it was all family, so everybody was building … That’s the way it started.”

A foundation forms

When we visited the site of the cemetery in Grier Heights in the lead-up to Wednesday’s event, leaves covered the ground, making it hard at first to decipher where the graves were located.

As we walked deeper into the woods, however, towards the construction of new apartments behind it, depressions in the ground made clear where folks had been laid to rest decades ago.

Then there were gravestones, some of which still in good condition, showing last names familiar from the list of trustees who moved the church: Lucinda Davis (1881-1961), Virtgus Rodman (1888-1931), Private First Class Coatis S. Price, a medic in World War II (1913-1952).

Just 13 years old when it closed, Johnson still has memories of the church. He pointed to the gravestone of a woman named Lucinda Davis.

“She was like the fire for the church,” he said, fondly. “You know how Black folks get in the church when the Holy Ghost get in ‘em? That was her. She was a fire in the church. She warmed it up.”

If not for residents like Johnson and his fellow SLPCCF members, this sacred site may have been long redeveloped and forgotten. The property was until recently owned by Thompson Child and Family Focus, which runs the Family Services Center located between the cemetery site and Wendover Road.

“When they bought it, bless their heart, it was like a trust,” Johnson said of the company’s commitment not to develop the land. “They were going to hold it, so nothing happened.”

By 2019, as more apartments were approved on the land surrounding the site, Johnson and other descendants of the St. Lloyd Presbyterian Church members decided they should act.

Johnson said he just so happened to call Clay Grubb, CEO of local development firm Grubb Properties, for advice. He had known Grubb from his days on the Planning Commission and knew that he had experience with projects like this.

As it happened, Grubb had experience with projects exactly like it — he had bought the site of the St. Lloyd Presbyterian Church Cemetery in SouthPark around the turn of the millennium and had it designated as a historic landmark in 2004 with the intention of preserving it.

“I went to him to tell him what was going on,” Johnson recalled. “[Grubb] said, ‘Why don’t we just merge the two together and create a foundation, which we need anyway?’ So we agreed to do that.”

Grubb helped organize a ground-penetrating-radar study at the SouthPark site in 2022 that found 184 grave sites compared to the 78 sites discovered in a 1993 study. The same test carried out at the Wendover Road site in January 2024 revealed 62 graves where just 14 had been previously reported.

Since then, Johnson and the rest of the SLPCCF have been going through the bureaucratic process to secure the land from Thompson. Now that they own both sites, the real work can begin.

The foundation will work simultaneously on both sites, but Johnson expects the SouthPark site to come to completion first.

“Thompson didn’t have to do this, Clay [Grubbs] didn’t have to do this,” Johnson told Queen City Nerve. “But they wanted to preserve history, they wanted to keep our legacy going. So they said, ‘No, we want you all to take it because it’s here and we need somebody who’s going to keep it up, maintain it, and give it the honor and respect that it really needs.’ That’s where we come in.”

Read more: Group Works to Recognize Long-Abandoned Shuman Cemetery (2020)

For Johnson, the importance of the preservation project is an educational one, an inspirational one, a spiritual one and a way to pay homage not only to the church that once stood nearby but the strong community he grew up in, built by Black families working side by side.

Having grown up considering all of his neighbors to be members of his extended family, his mission can be summed up more concisely in one comment he muttered in passing while we toured the site that morning: “I have to do this because this is my family.”