Long-deceased, long unrecognized loved ones in Greensboro’s Maplewood Cemetery were commemorated on May 7 with interpretive benches designed and built by students in North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University’s landscape architecture program.
In collaboration with the office of N.C. A&T Vice Chancellor Robert Pompey, the city of Greensboro, the Friends of Green Hill Cemetery and Forge Greensboro, juniors in N.C. A&T's landscape architecture program, housed in the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, created eight unique, interpretive benches for a capstone project that accentuate the experience and the untold stories of the cemetery.
“There are decades of Aggies buried here in Maplewood, and in most cases, nobody knows where they are or what their stories are,” said landscape architecture assistant professor Steve Rasmussen Cancian. “This project is a small step toward righting that wrong and making it a place that’s well-cared for, loved, and where those stories are interpreted.”
Maplewood Cemetery was established in 1918 to provide a burial space for African American families in Greensboro after the close of Union Cemetery. Prior to that time, African Americans were buried in a segregated section of Green Hill Cemetery. Maplewood, which currently holds 13,000 graves, includes “hundreds” of deceased individuals without markers or historical records, according to Cancian.
Utilizing the space and staff assistance with Forge Greensboro, the city’s makerspace for community artisans, the landscape architecture students crafted the benches over several weeks in April with distinct traits that not only allowed for a place for guests to sit but offered tributary perspective into Maplewood’s deceased.
“We thought it would be very unique for the students to take their concepts all the way from concept to creation, so they were able to work at the Forge with our workshop leads and our mentors to be able to create their designs and built them on site,” said Forge executive director Tiffany N. Jacobs.
One such bench, “X Marks the Spot” designed by student Daniel Durant, repurposed church pews into an X-shaped seating space, with 311 laser-cut X’s engraved along the structure.
“Essentially, what I wanted to do was going off the tour guide that had explained to us that a lot of graves were just buried here with no names, no gravestones, no location or anything like that,” said Durant. “I had to dig into the amount of graves that were marked throughout the whole site, literally just listed as ‘X’. We wanted to show that even though they were lost, they still were not forgotten.”
The benches were ceremoniously unveiled on May 7 on site at Maplewood Cemetery, allowing CAES faculty and guests from the City of Greensboro to view and offer critiques on the results.
“I’ve seen some really phenomenal work today from the landscape architecture students at North Carolina A&T,” said Phil Fleischmann, director of City Greensboro Parks and Recreation. “Benches and seating areas that are really designed with this cemetery in mind, the site features, topography, and the feeling around the space where the seating is located. There’s a lot of different options and creativity, innovation, and paying homage to the history of the cemetery as well.”
