Mount Olive Cemetery

Mount Olive Cemetery (photo by Brogan Heavner)

The Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church Cemetery in Mars Hill, North Carolina, is tended by a small but faithful group of descendants and caretakers: Small bouquets of red, yellow, and purple flowers adorn most of the graves, and all but a few gravestones have clean and legible inscriptions. The decorations set into the stones are diverse: Doves, tractors, hands in prayer, music notes, plain Latin crosses, and classic cars (among other things), but their inscriptions testify to a shared community experience spanning generations: Loving Wife, Father, Grandmother, Son—words which, regardless of their commonality (or perhaps because of it) never lose their poignancy. Buried here are all manner of people: Soldiers, mothers, painters, children, musicians, but each of these lives is a thread in the fabric of the surrounding community. Standing among the graves, it is easy to find oneself wrapped up in that fabric, warmed and moved by the loves and losses of generations of people who have called Long Ridge home.  

This cemetery has been the principal burial ground of the African-American Long Ridge community of Mars Hill for nearly a century. It is down the road from Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church on land owned by the church near the Mars Hill Anderson Rosenwald School. The church was founded in 1917 when the Piney Grove Church congregation sold its church in nearby Paint Fork and established a new church in Long Ridge near the Anderson Rosenwald School, combining with a local congregation that had been meeting in the schoolhouse. Its first known interment was Decatur “Dock” Rucker, who was born in 1848 (before Emancipation)1848 and died in 1928. As of 2024, there are over 150 graves, including many veterans and important local community members such as Viola King Barnette, who helped ensure local African-American children had the opportunity to continue their education in high school after graduating from the Anderson Rosenwald School. 

Today, 2024 -- almost a hundred years (at the time of writing) since it began -- the Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church Cemetery is still used and maintained by the church’s small but faithful congregation. Preserving a cemetery, however, especially one as large and historic as Mount Olive, is a considerable task. In recent years, other local churches and organizations like the Racial Justice Coalition have worked with Mount Olive to support the site’s preservation -- in part, with an annual soup supper. 

Bibliography 

Friends of the Mars Hill Anderson Rosenwald School and the Mars Hill Anderson Rosenwald School History Committee. The Historic Mars Hill Anderson Rosenwald School. Pisgah Press, Asheville, NC, 2022.  

Mt. Olive Church Cemetery Survey (compiled from Cemeteries of Madison County, North Carolina by Jan C. Plemmons). Charity Ray Collection, Southern Appalachian Archives, Mars Hill University.  

Plemmons, Jan C. Cemeteries of Madison County, North Carolina. Jacksonville, Florida: Jan C. Plemmons, 1998. 

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Essay by Nicolas Varner, Darian Smathers, and Taylor Zima, with input from other AS 327 students.