The Wrightsville Cemetery Association (WCA) is seeking additional funds and volunteers to help with the upkeep of the Mount Pisgah Cemetery, located on Mulberry Street in Wrightsville Borough, as the 2020 spring mowing season approaches.
The Wrightsville Borough is in the process of acquiring legal responsibility for the cemetery, but it may then turn over the care and operation of the cemetery to the WCA. Since the beginning of the summer 2019 season, American Legion Post 469 has been contributing volunteers and equipment. The WCA also began tending the cemetery at the end of the summer.
Mount Pisgah Cemetery, also known as Stone Church Cemetery, was established in 1855 as a Historical African American Cemetery, according to historical information obtained by Warren Taylor, the cemetery's current manager and a WCA board member. The cemetery is named for the nearby stone church building on Second Street, which was erected in 1891 by the Jameson family of free African American slave lineage.
The church served as the meeting place for an AME congregation that may date back to the 1830s and was reportedly also used for public school classes in the late 1800s. The church congregation dissolved in 1962, but the building remains.
The cemetery contains a monument that was dedicated in June 2014, recognizing a black soldier who was the only fatality of the Battle of Wrightsville in June 1863. Among the Civil War veterans interred at the cemetery is Cpl. Henry Bear, a member of the 127th U.S. Colored Troops.
For more information about the cemetery, readers may visit http://www.wrightsvillecemetery.org.
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