Historical photos courtesy of Library of Congress, Walnut Hills Historical Society, FindAGrave, Cincinnati Sites and Stories, and the Collection of Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library
It’s a warm June afternoon in the small, wood-paneled conference room inside Union Baptist Church on the western edge of downtown. Louise Stevenson slides open the door of one of the wood cabinets that line the back of the room. She pulls out a well-worn cemetery logbook, one of many that members of the oldest African American Baptist church in Cincinnati have faithfully preserved for more than 150 years. A piece of paper taped to the cabinet directs, “PLEASE KEEP DOOR CRACKED. Air Circulation is required for the Preservation of the Books. Thanks, UBC Trustee Board.”
Under a patch of fluorescent light spilling from a single ceiling panel, a hard-working oscillating fan is earnestly trying to circulate the air in here, but it does little to cool off the four women who are gathered around the big conference table. They’ve collectively spent many, many hours in this inner sanctum of Union Baptist Church, poring over time-worn cemetery records, cataloging thousands of meticulously handwritten index cards peppered with biographical details about buried individuals, and piecing together the lives and stories preserved in the church’s two cemeteries.
One of them, the Union Baptist Cemetery, founded in 1864, is a 16-acre site in Price Hill. It’s the oldest Black cemetery in Hamilton County still in its original location. The other, the United Colored American Cemetery, sits on a hilly 11.5-acre site in Madisonville and was founded in 1848. It was originally located in Avondale but was moved to its current location in 1883–1884 when a group of white neighborhood citizens considered it a nuisance and demanded that it be moved somewhere else. Union Baptist Church took ownership in 1968.
Photograph by Asa Featherstone
Together, these two cemeteries provide the final resting places for more than 30,000 Black Cincinnatians, along with the stories and legacies they left behind. The people buried in these two cemeteries include doctors, lawyers, teachers, writers, poets, and scholars; state legislators, politicians, business owners, and entrepreneurs; professional athletes, artists, and performers; reverends, priests, and bishops; abolitionists, suffragists, and Underground Railroad conductors; and Civil War heroes and veterans of WWI and WWII.
Both cemeteries are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, but they’ve clearly seen better days. They require tons of work, time, and money to manage and preserve for future generations. And, originally, Stevenson, the church’s communication coordinator and grant committee leader, didn’t want any part of that work.
“The cemeteries had always been a bone of contention for many of us in the church because of the amount of money we set aside to take care of them,” she says. The church’s other ministry needs—children’s programming, for example—would be a better use of the church’s money, Stevenson had always thought. “The cemeteries were costing us around $40,000 a year, and a lot of us were like, Ah, just let the cemeteries go.”
Around six years ago, though, that all changed. Stevenson, a fourth-generation member of Union Baptist whose family joined the church in 1937, took a seat on the church’s trustee board. “When you get on the trustee board, you start to understand the full gamut of work that has to be done,” she says.
Stevenson grew up in this church, as many of its members have. “My pastor said the cemetery work was an area of need and I was needed. Now, when your pastor gives you a task, you might not understand it and you might not like it, but you follow the task that God has sent you on. And I started to learn that we really needed to do more to help these cemeteries.”
That sentiment was shared by church member Dorene Dillard, who joined the trustee board around the same time Stevenson did. “I was very interested in helping our efforts with the cemeteries because I knew there were veterans buried here and I had researched some of them,” says Dillard, who served eight years in the Air Force and comes from a military family, with her dad (Marine) and brother (Air Force) also serving. “But I stepped up not knowing how much work it is. There just aren’t a lot of resources. We have a small budget for the cemetery maintenance, and we exceed it every year.”
Photograph by Asa Featherstone
At various times throughout their history, the two cemeteries had a sexton to manage the operations, but the last one at Union Baptist Cemetery retired around 2020, says Rogena Stargel, a board member of the Union Foundation, a stand-alone philanthropic organization that’s helped the church and other local community organizations with development efforts, grant applications, planned giving efforts, and other funding streams. “When the Union Baptist Church cemetery was actively operating, it had its own staff and its own sexton,” she says. “As burials started to dwindle and budgets changed, the church reduced the cemetery full-time staff to part-time. And when the last sexton retired, oversight of the cemetery came under the church staff. Since then, much of this work has been more volunteer-driven, with members of the church helping to maintain the cemeteries.”
Dillard was tapped to serve as the church’s “directress of cemetery operations,” a staff position she describes as a “part-time job that is full-time work.” Everything related to the two cemeteries now falls under Dillard’s domain: mowing, upkeep, maintenance, record-keeping. “It’s a lot of work,” she says. “Thank God for Louise and other trustee members and volunteers who help out. It truly does take a village.”
Around the time Stevenson and Dillard joined the church’s trustee board, two new folks spontaneously showed up at a Sunday morning service in hopes of meeting church members and sharing information they’d discovered about the United Colored American Cemetery. “It turns out God sent them to us,” says Stevenson. “They had been to the cemetery and had done some research on their own, finding out things we didn’t know anything about. And then our philosophy about the cemeteries started to change. We started to realize who was buried in these cemeteries, and what kind of contributions they’d made in their lives, not just here but to the whole country. We were in awe.”
That started the proverbial ball rolling, or as Stevenson says, “We hit the pavement.” She and several others reached out and made connections in the community, digging into those drawerfuls of handwritten cemetery records and mapping out plans for how they could get funding to do the restoration and preservation work that’s needed in the two cemeteries.
“We got a grant committee together, and it took off like wildfire—it was crazy,” Dillard says. But there were setbacks, too: In August 2019, for example, neighbors in Price Hill alerted the church to vandalism that had occurred at Union Baptist Cemetery; several headstones had been toppled, and others were marked with spray paint. Even the cemetery’s historic marker was blemished with graffiti. “It was major damage, and so disheartening,” says Dillard. “There are some really old headstones out there made of marble and granite, and those cost a lot of money to repair. Today, it’s just unaffordable. With our limited budget, we did what we could.”
But news coverage of the vandalism sparked community interest in the cemeteries from both near and far. Local politicians took note. “Mayor [John] Cranley and the city gave us some money, Senator Sherrod Brown got us some money, and [Hamilton County] Commissioner Denise Driehaus helped us out,” Dillard says. “And we started hearing from people in California, New York, and New Jersey who wanted to help and from other Black cemeteries that reached out to connect with us.”
The momentum picked up. Through the Union Foundation, the church secured a $400,000 grant in 2020 from the National Park Service for the Union Baptist Cemetery Preservation Project, one of 51 projects to receive funding that year through the African American Civil Rights Grant Program. Then, in February, the Union Foundation struck a grant jackpot: a $750,000 from the National Park Service for the United Colored American Cemetery Preservation project, one of just eight projects in six states awarded federal funding through the Historic Preservation Fund’s History of Equal Rights program.
When the church found out about the $750,000 grant, it was Louise Stevenson who got the call. “We were sitting in this very room,” she says, referring to the conference room housing the cemetery log books, index files, plot maps, and other archived materials. “And we screamed a lot. The prayers of the saints had been answered. The ancestors jumped out of those graves that day.”
Stevenson made a flurry of phone calls. She shared the news with the church’s pastor, Reverend Dr. Orlando B. Yates; church trustees; and others who had contributed to the grant. “Louise called me to tell me the news,” says Dillard. “She said, Are you sitting down? and I was like, Oh no, what happened now? She told me we got the grant, and I screamed at the top of my lungs. I about passed out.”
Stevenson emphasizes every chance she gets that the cemetery work has been a team effort. Sometimes, she admits, that team has been small, but the results have been mighty. The $750,000 federal grant never would have been possible, she says, without the dedication and work of numerous people both inside and outside of Union Baptist Church. “Clearly, we weren’t meant to walk this path alone,” she says.
Madisonville residents Sarah Strouse May, an educator-turned-historical-tour-guide-jill-of-all-trades type, and Chris Hanlin, a retired architect and amateur historian, avid biker, and book author were two of those outside folks—the ones Stevenson said were “sent by God.” May and Hanlin visited Union Baptist Church for the first time about six years ago. May was running Nerd Girl Tours (“curated field trips for grown-ups,” she says) and crossed paths with cemetery buff Hanlin, who had stumbled upon United Colored American Cemetery about a mile from his home.
“I just wandered in and was struck by a sense of beauty and of mystery,” Hanlin recalls about his first visit to the cemetery. “Even though it was run down, I could see this was a special place, an amazing place, a sacred place. And I said, Wow, there’s got to be a story here. And it turned out that, boy, was there ever. Dozens of them!”
He dove into researching names on the headstones and was awed by the stories he started to uncover. He brought them to the attention of the Cincinnati Preservation Association and began writing stories about the cemeteries’ prominent residents for the association’s blog.
Stevenson quickly brought May and Hanlin into the fold of folks who were starting to work on cemetery preservation efforts in earnest. “When Louise first showed me the archived cemetery records stored at the church, it was like rays from Heaven shone down, and I could hear angels singing,” May says. “I nearly lost my mind.”
May reached out to her friend Holly McGee, a historian and associate professor of Africana Studies at the University of Cincinnati, and connected her with Stevenson and the little-team-that-could of cemetery champions. “Dr. McGee was critical in securing those grants,” says Stevenson. “I don’t know what we would have done without her.”
McGee started bringing her UC students out to the cemeteries on field trips, often on tours led by Hanlin, whose encyclopedic knowledge of the people buried in the two cemeteries is practically the stuff of lore now. The students then got involved with archival research of cemetery documents.
“The church has handwritten death certificates of people dating back to the 1860s, thousands of them,” says McGee. “It’s amazing what you can learn about American history, and particularly the Black lived experience of history, based on simple things like death certificates.”
McGee says she both loves and hates examining the records. “The Black church women who wrote these notes are the recorders of history, with their beautiful cursive writing,” she says. “The records show hard truths, too, like a coincidentally high number of death certificates for Black men aged 18 to 25 who died of ‘causes unknown’ or at the hands of an unknown party, or the cause of death is just left blank. You can see the plague of racism play out even in something as simple as these death certificates.”
One of McGee’s UC students, Rachel Powell, who is majoring in history and minoring in anthropology, is doing an internship with Union Baptist Church to help with genealogical research requests and coordinate with the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library, which has started digitizing cemetery records. “I always had a love of history, but Dr. McGee is the one who really ignited that with her class,” says Powell. “I did a genealogy project for her, and I’m still working on it. I’m up to 900 people in my family tree, and about a month ago I found out that I’m related to George Washington. There are many amazing stories in these cemeteries, stories that need to be told. I want to help make that happen.”
Photograph by Asa Featherstone
People’s shared passion for history and interest in their own family genealogy is a key connection point with the cemeteries, Stevenson says. “There’s a heightened interest in the country, from people of all races, to find out about their ancestors,” she says. “So we have to make this information available.”
Now, the Union Baptist Cemetery’s advisory board and a team at the public library is doing just that, at no cost to the church. “We started last summer and have scanned the cemetery logs and record books and the bound volumes,” says Clarity Amrein, the library’s community content coordinator. “We’ll eventually digitize all of the index cards, maps, plots, everything.”
The digital materials will then be easily available as part of the library’s searchable database. “People won’t need a library card or any special tool or key or password to access it,” says Amrein. “It’s all searchable from our website or directly from Google.”
Having those digital records available to the public will eventually ease the tedious work currently managed by Stevenson, Dillard, and the rest of the UBC cemetery team, who frequently field requests from people seeking a loved one who might be buried in either cemetery. It can be an exhaustive and sometimes devastating—or elating—process, says Gwen Hall, a church trustee who volunteers her time to help with the record searches. “I can feel the hurt in their voices when they call looking for a loved one’s grave site, or when they can’t find it,” she says. Sometimes people have incomplete or incorrect information, and sometimes, even though the person might be buried at either cemetery, their plot can’t be found or identified.
The happy stories are the ones like that of retired welder James I. Clark and his son, local librarian Gregory Knight, who can trace their family tree back to Thomas Jefferson through their ancestors buried in Union Baptist Cemetery, Peter and Sarah Fossett, both of whom were born into slavery. Peter grew up at the Monticello plantation and was emancipated in Jefferson’s will. Clark has Peter’s manumission papers, and Sarah’s as well—incredibly rare documents that served as legal evidence of a former enslaved person’s freedom. The Fossetts eventually moved to Cincinnati and married in 1854, and became members of Union Baptist Church and active abolitionists in the Underground Railroad.
Clark, 83, has a priceless cache of historical documents chronicling the Fossetts’ lives, some of which are now on display in a special exhibit at the Walnut Hills library branch. “I’m thankful that so many people are concerned and trying to help my family legacy continue,” he says. “And I’m thankful that all Black people weren’t thrown away.”
There’s a lot of pain around these historic Black cemeteries, but Stevenson hopes to change those perceptions. “We want these cemeteries to be celebratory places, destinations that people want to come to, where they can learn about our ancestors,” she says.
That perception shift is critically important for young people in our community, says Angelita Moreno Jones, a Union Foundation board member and former chair of the Union Baptist Church trustee board who remembers playing at United Colored American Cemetery when she was young and her father was the sexton there. “This isn’t just our history, this is American history,” she says. “I remember running around those hills. It’s full of memories for me.”
Jones says it’s vital that to preserve Black history in Cincinnati “to show that African Americans had a large voice in building our area, and our country. So many historical places get dilapidated, but it’s important that we keep them up and preserve this history. And it will take a lot of work.”
The work will continue as members of the Union Baptist Church dive into restoration and repair efforts at the United Colored American Cemetery, thanks to the National Park Service grant. The $750,000 award will cover three main jobs over the next three years: repair the cemetery’s receiving vault, the structure where bodies were kept in winter when burials were delayed until the ground thawed; repair the curvy, unpaved road that’s nearly overgrown by grass; and address primary landscaping issues and headstone restoration. The next step for the foundation will be to hire key professionals to help accomplish those tasks. It will be a long haul, everyone realizes, to achieve the collective dream to fully restore these historic places.
In the meantime, though, you can count on a handful of dedicated church ladies in their stuffy, wood-paneled room downtown. They’ll keep carefully tending to the precious treasury of cemetery records, where all of the stories—and the people who lived them—wait to be discovered again.
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