Charlotte's historic cemeteries

Elmwood, Pinewood and Potter's Field

The City of Charlotte bought the land in 1853, when Settlers Cemetery on West Fifth Street — until then the city's first and only municipal burial ground — was running out of room.

What the city created was not one cemetery but three, on one hundred acres:

• Elmwood, for white residents
• Pinewood, for African American residents
• Potter's Field, for those who could not afford a plot

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission's own survey report puts the arrangement plainly:

"the separation of black and white graves into two completely segregated cemeteries (Elmwood was white, Pinewood, black, physically separated by a chain fence) made the Elmwood Cemetery complex the center of a controversial local civil rights campaign during the late 1960s."

A chain fence, through a graveyard, until the late 1960s. The three are now administered as a single cemetery of about seventy-two acres on the 700 block of West Sixth Street.

Who is buried there

The survey report names, among many thousands:

• Edward Dilworth Latta, who developed Dilworth — the neighbourhood that carries his middle name
• D. A. Tompkins, the textile entrepreneur whose company built mills across the city
• S. S. McNinch, a former mayor of Charlotte
• W. W. Smith, described by the report as Charlotte's first Black architect

That last name is worth pausing on. W. W. Smith designed the Mecklenburg Investment Company Building in Brooklyn — financed by Black professionals in 1921–22 as the first office building in Charlotte open to them, and one of the very few Brooklyn buildings to survive urban renewal. The man who built it is buried on the segregated side of the city's municipal cemetery.

Old Settlers' Cemetery

On West Fifth Street in Fourth Ward — Charlotte's first municipal burial ground, and the reason Elmwood exists. It stopped being able to take the city's dead.

Visiting

A volunteer organisation, Historic Elmwood Pinewood, publishes virtual tours of all three cemeteries, runs a "Voices from the Past" programme and a 5K, and describes the grounds as Uptown's largest public green space — with, in its own words, families picnicking among some of the city's finest specimen trees.

These are working cemeteries and active burial grounds. Visit as you would any other: quietly, on the paths, and not during a service.

Tours, events and current access are on their site.