When Laurel Cemetery opened on the outskirts of Baltimore in 1852, its owners advertised a beautiful, peaceful spot, with “high and undulating” grounds, a public chapel, and tree-lined walks. The site had already been used for years for the burial of black servants of wealthier white people. But as the city’s first nonsectarian graveyard for black residents, Laurel Cemetery was supposed to become a place where the luminaries of Baltimore’s black community could be remembered forever.
“All who procure burials here are sure of an undisturbed resting place for all time to come,” an 1858 ad promised.
The life span of that promise fell far short of eternity. Today, the hill is gone. The chapel is gone. The gravestones and walks are gone. On the site of “the city’s most fashionable burying ground,” as the Baltimore Afro American described it in 1951, stands a Food Depot, a discount department store, and a Dollar General, among other commercial buildings.
In the 1960s, over the objections of families with relatives buried there, the cemetery was paved over by developers with political connections. “One day, they put a big plastic fence around the whole thing and started using earthmoving equipment and moving bodies,” says Julius Zuke. A school librarian, Zuke grew up a few blocks from the cemetery, and a couple of years ago he had his students research the site, which has been long forgotten by most of the city.
The developers claimed that they relocated the cemetery, but as Zuke says, “there was always a suspicion in the neighborhood—did they get all the bodies?
For more than half a century, Laurel Cemetery was a fixture in Baltimore. Behind the wall stood the stately headstones of the Reverend Daniel A. Payne, the first African-American president of an American college, and Alexander Wayman, a prominent bishop of the A.M.E. Church. Cabell Calloway, whose descendants include the famous bandleader Cab Calloway, was buried there, along with many of the city’s upper class of lawyers, politicians, and clergymen.