The funeral home marker at Flossie White’s grave is still legible. The grave is one of 16 found so far at the Stearns C.M.E Temple cemetery in Statesville.
Courtesy of Joel Reese, Iredell County Public Library
The location of the Stearns C.M.E Temple cemetery is no longer a mystery.
For years rumors had persisted that the Stearns Temple Cemetery had been covered over with a housing development sometime in the 1980s. Marci Sigmon with the city of Statesville, with the help of Chris Bridges and Sharon Walker with the Iredell County GIS Department, located the cemetery.
There are gravestones and markers still visible in the cemetery.
Flossie White and Leemar Harper
Sixteen graves so far were identified by either a headstone or a funeral home temporary metal marker. One of the metal markers still had the name of the person behind the glass in the metal marker. It belonged to Flossie White. The marker says she died on March 26, 1944. Her death certificate says she died at the age of 54 and was born in Georgia in 1891.
This identifies two individuals that we know were buried at Stearns Temple by their death certificates.
The first grave clearly linked to an individual at the Stearns cemetery was the grave of 9-year-old Leemar Harper from the town of Madison in Morgan County, Georgia. His parents, Charlie Harper and Georgia McIntosh Harper, migrated to Statesville in the early 1920s looking for work after the boll weevil wiped out the cotton crops in Georgia.
The grave of Leemar Harper at the Stearns C.M.E Temple cemetery in Statesville. Harper’s grave is one of two at the cemetery that have been matched with death certificates.
Courtesy of Joel Reese, Iredell County Public Library
The Landmark on April 8, 1926, reported that Leemar had been using gasoline to start a fire on a Sunday morning when the container exploded, burning him severely. He died from burns on April 5, 1926. Johnson Funeral Home handled the service, and his internment was in Stearns Chapel on the morning of April 6th.
The presence of these markers makes this location as most likely being the Stearns Temple Cemetery.
Stearns Memorial or Holsey Memorial C.M.E. Church, as it is called today, was torn down years ago after the church was relocated.
The cemetery remains. Finding it was far from easy.
We talked to several people who grew up in the area who tried to tell us where the cemetery was located, and we spent hours following their directions going through woods and briar patches with no luck. We even drove someone out there, but the roads and landscape were all different from when they lived there. We were actually close to it at one point, but the graves were hidden behind trees, brush and briars.
How did Stearns Temple come by its name?
Local lore says that the African Americans from Georgia were encouraged to move to Iredell County by Carroll Adams Stearns, who needed workers for the Stearns Brothers construction company. Stearns paved many of Statesville’s early streets and constructed the Woodlawn and Country Club Estates along with the Elma Apartments. Stearns was perhaps Statesville’s first modern real estate developer and today he is best remembered for having built the Stearns Building that once housed the Playhouse Theater on the bottom floor. The Stearns Building was Statesville’s first skyscraper at six stories tall. It was torn down in 1983.
It was Stearns who gave the African Americans from Georgia a lot in 1924 on Washington Avenue to build their church. The “Georgia People,” as locals called them, are members of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, today called the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. The church they built on Washington Avenue was named after their benefactor as the Stearns Temple C.M.E. Church and was the first C.M.E. church in Iredell County.
In the 1930s the name was changed to Holsey Memorial C.M.E. in honor of Bishop Lucias H. Holsey, one of the denomination’s first bishops. The area where the church was located was in the Sunnyside community at 734 Washington Ave.
In the later part of 1977, the congregation at Holsey Memorial purchased the St. Pius X Catholic Church at the intersection of Front and Mulberry streets near downtown Statesville. St. Pius had purchased the church from St. John’s Lutheran Church who had it built and first opened on Jan. 7, 1923, at what is today 222 S. Mulberry St. The old Stearns/Holsey C.M.E. church building was later torn down. The property where the church stood, and the cemetery said to have been only 200 feet from the church, is owned by the Statesville Housing Authority.
81 graves listed in cemetery
Death certificates and newspaper death notices identify 81 people as having been buried in Stearns Chapel Cemetery. You can see a list of their names along with other information at https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2715598/stearn‘s-chapel-methodist-church-cemetery. Just click where it says, “View Memorials.” Most of the information was gathered by Peggy O’Malley, a former library employee and Statesville native. Cemeteries in the Statesville area also include Fourth Creek Cemetery (1750s) on West End Avenue, the Allison Cemetery (1795) off Hartness Road, Green Street Cemetery (1885) on Green Street, Oakwood Cemetery (1887) on North Oakwood Drive, and Belmont Cemetery (1943) on East Greenbriar Road.
Joel Reese is the Local History Librarian at the Iredell County Public Library.
Want to visit the cemetery?
I will try to describe how to find the cemetery. Go south on Shelton Avenue past the Dollar General on the right then past Phifer’s Hot Wings & Bar-O-Q on the left and take the next road on the left which will be East Raleigh Ave. Go across the railroad tracks on East Raleigh and you will see an apartment complex on the right. Go just past the entrance to the complex and park along Raleigh before the road begins to turn back to the left. To your right you will see a section of woods behind the apartments. The cemetery is down the hill in those woods.
— Joel Reese, Iredell County Public Library
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