Community trusts WU sophomore to tell cemetery’s story

BURNSVILLE — Tucked away off a country road, the cemetery sits unassumingly atop a small knoll in rural northwest Anson County. Marked by a large boulder with the words “M.B. Church Cemetery” painted on it, the burial mound overlooks a dirt raceway. On the nearby country roads, there are no signs pointing the way to it. You’d never know it was there unless you were looking for it.

Members of Poplar Springs Missionary Baptist Church know it’s there. They’ve frequented the cemetery for years seeking the graves of their forebears, some of whom were formerly enslaved people, some buried before the Civil War. It was one of the few places in the area in the 1800s where people of color could be laid to rest, and it was a rare integrated cemetery, with members of the slave-owning family, the Turners, memorialized by a large granite headstone erected in the 1950s. That is the only “new” grave marker in the cemetery, but several others are readable, or close to it, if only you can find them.

On one visit to the cemetery, Carol Smith found the grave of her great-great-grandmother among the half-sunk tombstones and time-worn grave markers that make up most of the acreage. It had been a time-consuming hunt. This isn’t Arlington National Cemetery. It’s more like a clearing in the woods, with visitors stepping carefully over downed trees and squinting to see if a rock jutting out of the ground might actually be a corner of a headstone.

Every once in a while, a grave hunter finds a needle in that haystack, such as the time Smith’s great-great-grandfather was located.

“I thought he was buried somewhere else,” says Smith, director of the Burnsville Recreation & Learning Center. “Found out he’s buried here. Julia found that.”

“Julia” is Wingate University junior Julia Lasure. During an internship in the spring of 2021, Lasure, then a second-semester sophomore, found herself tasked with finding and cataloging the residents of the cemetery. The history major used every tool at her disposal – including a few she hadn’t heard of before – to discover who is calling the cemetery home for eternity.

Lasure turned out to be a godsend for the residents of the community of Burnsville. The area, just north of Polkton, is relatively poor. There was no money available to hire anyone to help members of the Learning Center organize the information they’d already found or to hunt down additional graves. Some local volunteer grave-hunters had done some investigating before, with good results, but the project was just too much for members of the community to handle on their own.

Not sure where else to turn, they looked 20 miles southwest to Wingate University. The school turned out to be a great resource, and Lasure, handpicked by Dr. David Mitchell, proved to be perfect for the job.

“I don’t think we could have gotten anyone any better suited for this job than Julia,” Smith says. “The relationship has just been so good.”

Lasure grew to love history in high school, and she came to Wingate intending to major in it. A project of this magnitude was just the ticket to test that preconceived idea.

Mitchell, assistant professor of history and director of race and ethnic studies at Wingate, had an inkling after teaching Lasure as a freshman that she could be ready to tackle a big project soon, to test herself (and her confidence in her major) in a pretty big way. That’s not the normal path. Most internships happen during or soon after a student’s junior year, maybe even during her senior year, when she has had more classes in her major. But Mitchell was curious.

“I wanted to see what type of impact an internship like this would have on somebody who’s younger, who’s a sophomore – somebody who’s going to be coming back to school here,” he says. “I have high hopes that she offers kind of a new blueprint for how we should think of internships. We should really think of them as a part of the educational process, so she’s making connections with things she’s learning in class.

“She sees that there are practical applications to history. There are practical applications to the liberal arts. Being able to read well. Being able to solve problems, to think critically. But also to have empathy toward different groups of people.”

Projects such as this one are also tailor-made for a new type of history student. History majors at a place like Wingate have mostly followed one of two paths: education or law. Lasure has other ideas: She’d like to do “public history,” most likely working at a museum, either curating exhibits or doing archiving.

Even if Lasure goes into a field unrelated to history, Mitchell says internships such as the cemetery project will prepare her well.

“We’re doing more and more with public history and trying to apply the techniques we teach students in classes to get them a job out there,” Mitchell says. “Being able to research, to work independently, to be resourceful, to find money or find opportunities, particularly when there aren’t any – those are valuable skills. It doesn’t really matter what type of job you get when you finish up. Those skills are transferable.”

Lasure came in as a top history student, taking a 300-level course as a freshman and joining the University’s honors program. But even if you’re not among the brightest in your class, Mitchell says, early internships could be invaluable.

“A situation like this might be beneficial to students who weren’t the best students in high school,” he says, “because doing history like this, in a community, where you see the immediate results, where you do research and find things and you’re able to share them with a community … that can be very rewarding and can create a fire under a student who may have come into the university directionless.”

Lasure was onboard from the start, but Mitchell still had to persuade Smith and others in Burnsville that a student who had been in college for only a little over a year could really help them – especially since Mitchell was going to keep his distance from the project as much as possible.

“My part has been in trying to get the community to trust in a 20-year-old student who didn’t know anything about doing this type of work before she went out there,” Mitchell says. “One of the challenges has been to wean the community off the professor and onto the student. Just to communicate to them, ‘Look, she doesn’t know what she’s doing yet, but she’s a quick study. Give her an opportunity to fail.’ It was my job to force them to rely on her.”

There was also the issue of trust. Lasure had to convince Smith and the other Burnsville residents that not only would she catch on quickly but that, as an outsider, she would give the project the attention it deserved.

Lasure’s natural humility, work ethic and eagerness to please won them over.

“I just trusted her, as far as her personality, her sincerity, the way that she came across to me,” Smith says. “I felt like I could relate to her.”

Lasure’s demeanor helped her in many ways as she went about piecing together the past for a lot of Burnsville residents. To learn more about the subjects of her research, she did one-on-one interviews with descendants, looking to jog their memory or simply to share what she’d learned.

“I talked to a woman in Chicago who was telling me how she knew that her mother was buried there, but she also thought her great-grandmother was buried there,” Lasure says. “She gave me some names. I was like, ‘Oh yeah. She’s buried here.’ And then I told her the nickname she went by. And she was like, ‘I had no idea about any of this.’ It was really cool to reveal this to them.”

Mitchell gave Lasure guidance throughout the process and showed her some invaluable tools she could use for digging up information, but otherwise, he tried to stay out of her way.

“I identified the student, I consulted with the student, I mentored the student,” he says, “but ultimately I wanted to give her as much responsibility as I thought she could handle because that’s how you learn these things.”

This type of opportunity was just what Lasure envisioned when she decided to enroll at Wingate. She had been looking at other schools in North Carolina, both public and private, when a friend mentioned Wingate. Until then, the University hadn’t been on her radar. Lasure decided to look into it. Then she came for a visit.

“When you tour you really know if it clicks,” Lasure says. “I toured a few colleges, but nothing clicked like Wingate did. I think because it is a small campus, and I like that one-on-one environment with your professors, your classmates, everything. I just thought the campus was beautiful. Everything just felt right.”

It wasn’t long after Welcome Week that she was getting to know her professors, and they were getting to know her. At Wingate, faculty members are always keeping an eye out for talented students, so that when opportunities arise they know whom to call on. Mitchell had a feeling that working with the folks in Burnsville could be mutually beneficial, giving Lasure some hands-on experience early in her college career and providing research and organizational help to a community that was starved for it.

Lasure took to the task “like a duck to water,” Mitchell says. Searching online, she combed through newspaper archives and records of births, marriages and deaths. She prodded potential ancestors of people who might be buried in the cemetery for clues. She even brought friends out to Burnsville to clear away brush, leaves and limbs and search for potential gravesites.

“We knew the graveyard was overgrown,” Lasure says. “And it was very overgrown. Even to this day you wouldn’t recognize it as a graveyard. The gravestones are all scattered and broken.”

When Lasure came across an unreadable stone that she thought might mark someone’s final resting place, she rubbed flour on it, hoping to draw out any etchings.

She combined her research with what the grave hunters and the residents of Burnsville had already accumulated and posted it all on a website she created using a free service (to minimize the cost for Burnsville residents). She has continued to update the site as she has gained new information. The site has 170 entries, including, in many cases, dates of birth and death, spouses’ names, parents’ names, occupations and any offspring and siblings. The website is more than just a list of names. It’s a historical document that tells the story of the area. Among the 170 is “William Far (Pharr) Burns,” who was born in 1795 and died in 1864. Burnsville is named after him.

The website has been a big hit, and even after the internship Lasure was still hunting for the names of cemetery residents and was even plotting a way to produce an online map of the graveyard.

“It was very exciting to, one, have history come to life and, two, give back to people and let them have the connection and retell their stories,” she says. “It was weird. I felt like I shouldn’t be told this information. It was so personal. It was so exciting that they were trusting me with it.”

The internship was in many ways a test. Just how much did Lasure want to learn history and work as a historian, no matter the setting? Just how much did she really love history?

“I needed somebody who could be pretty resourceful, and I wanted somebody who lived fairly close around here and could do some of this work,” Mitchell says of Lasure, who is from Cornelius, a little over an hour away from Burnsville. “But I think the most important thing is you have to find people who are interested in this work because they enjoy doing it. It’s not a glamorous internship. They’re not flying over four states to work at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., for the summer, or even downtown Charlotte.”

Even so, there’s always the potential to gain some notice, if you’ve done good work. In May of 2021, WCNC-TV in Charlotte did a feature story on the project for one of its news programs. “We don’t want the best and brightest students to go to Washington, D.C.,” Mitchell says. “We want to keep them here in the community, where they can make a difference. And it’s kind of funny how the camera and notoriety find you if you do a good job.”

And by all accounts Lasure did just that. She’s made a difference in the lives of many in Burnsville, shedding new light on an often-overlooked group of people.

“What we are doing is beginning to put meat back on their bones so people can really see that these people mattered, that they were important,” Smith says. “It’s just been overjoying.”