City of Raleigh Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Resources; Richard Grubb & Associates, Inc.

Mount Hope Cemetery is historically and culturally significant as one of North Carolina’s earliest African American municipal cemeteries. The African American section of Raleigh’s City Cemetery was full by the early 1870s, prompting the City of Raleigh to find a new site for African American burials. The city purchased 11.5 acres south of town in early 1872. Mount Hope Cemetery includes several fine examples of 19^th century funerary sculpture as well as simpler and/or unmarked gravestones. Many bear the markings of local artisans, including African American stonecutter Columbus Stronach Cutter.  A few antebellum markers indicate that some families had deceased members relocated from City Cemetery to new family plots at Mount Hope. The cemetery expanded over the decades to bring it to its current size of 34.3 acres. Its picturesque garden design features curvilinear driveways, grassy lawns, and a variety of deciduous and evergreen trees. Approximately 1,500 monuments commemorating prominent local black citizens are also found throughout the grounds. The Cemetery was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2009 and was designated as a Raleigh Historic Landmark in 2017.

Over the years, Mount Hope Cemetery’s grave markers and monuments have been damaged from both human and natural forces. In recent years many efforts have been made to improve the database and recording methods of burials, best maintenance practices, and monument restoration. Prior to 2020, the late Dean Ruedrich was hired to complete monument restoration and fix monuments that were vandalized or broken. After his passing, the department wanted to continue restoring broken monuments and incorporate the practice of leveling and preserving monuments in the City of Raleigh’s historic cemeteries.

The Mount Hope Cemetery staff was trained in basic monument restoration by Jason Harpe of Richard Grubb & Associates, Inc. (RGA) in 2020. RGA’s three-day cemetery conservation workshop with city staff provided them with skills they could use to continue the preservation efforts at the cemetery. From the RGA workshop, staff learned how to properly level ground supported tablets and repair damaged gravestones and monuments using epoxies and lime mortars to stabilize a variety of gravestone types and forms. RGA’s philosophy is that people should be trained on the basic principles of gravestone conservation so that they can perform simple cleaning and resetting, because many of the individuals and organizations who undertake the work do not have the funds to secure a professional conservator. With the knowledge gained, the staff repaired and restored more than 20 monuments in 2021 and has made it part of their daily maintenance tasks to identify and restore additional grave markers in need of attention.

Cemetery staff has also been working for the past two years mapping where individuals in the cemetery are buried using the original lot maps, records, and existing monuments.  Due to the loss of records from a 1930 fire, locations and burial records were lost. The cemetery staff has been able to compile a comprehensive list of who is buried at Mount Hope using death records at the North Carolina State Archives to recognize and locate as many people as possible that are buried in the cemetery to develop a working public interface that anyone can use.

Thanks to the efforts of the Cemetery staff the goal of restoration, mapping, and data collection working in tandem for the preservation of this important cultural landscape is being realized.

The Board of Directors of Capital Area Preservation, Inc. is pleased to present a 2022 Anthemion Award to the City of Raleigh Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Resources; Richard Grubb & Associates, Inc. for the Cultural Landscape Preservation of Mount Hope Cemetery, Raleigh.