I visited Fayetteville’s historic graveyards. Here’s what I learned about our history.

Every life is a story that ends in a sad event — namely the death of the central character.

So to walk through a quiet cemetery is to leaf through a storybook filled with narratives of people who loved, lost, worked, fought, struggled, laughed, cried and experienced the whole of it — like what we are doing now.

Fayetteville, which started as a settlement of Scottish immigrants in 1739, has plenty of old graveyards, as one would expect. So you can drop in any one of those “open books” and leaf through history’s pages.

I will tell you a little about three of them.

At Second Baptist, there are stories but sometimes no markers

I bumped into Joann Adams, historian at Second Missionary Baptist Church not long ago, and she told me about the interesting folks buried in church-affiliated cemetery at the corner of Wright and Mann streets. It was established circa 1894, and is located just south of the church, which is at 522 Old Wilmington Road.

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“There are many stories to be researched, told and retold of those in the Second Baptist Cemetery,” Adams wrote in a account of the cemetery's history she emailed to me later. “Some graves are now unmarked and some of the tomb stones have unreadable words.

“The black churches and cemeteries in many States have a lot of significant history, especially for African Americans. The upkeep of these sacred spaces is important for their continued existence.”

As a reminder of how tenuous that physical connection to those past stories can be: No visible marker is found for Henry Adams, founder of Second Baptist Church in 1886.

Adams pastored several churches according to the church history, and one of his sons would go on to serve in an all-Black World War I unit, assigned to the French Army.

“They wore the French Army Blue Helmet and used French army gear,” the history states.

Some people buried in the cemetery were born during slavery, others “may or may not have been born free,” according to church history.

Several veterans are buried there, including one William Robert Shipman, whose gravesite has the only World War I veteran marker.

Widows and daughters of a defeated idea, buried near sports fields

On the opposite end of the cultural spectrum, so to speak, and about four miles northwest, lies a different set of stories: The 65 gravesites of former residents of the Confederate Woman’s Home and Cemetery on Rock Avenue, behind Terry Sanford High School.

At the site, two abandoned-looking columns hold up an archway that says “Confederate Women’s Home.” The wrought-iron sign looks like what you might see in a movie, one that is at the creepy end of the spectrum.

Widows and daughters of the defeated Confederacy lived in the woman’s home built in 1915 (but notably without the sign), according to an entry on the home at “Commemorative Landscapes,” a state-operated website.

The home opened with help from the state legislature.

“By 1981 only seven women lived in the home and it was not practical to keep it in operation,” the website said. “In 1982 the two-story brick building was razed and the land used as a parking lot for Terry Sanford High School.”

The graves remained, right behind the Bulldogs' sports fields.

Plaques list mainly just the women’s names, and when they were born and died, but some of the names have small glimpses of their stories, such as Salena Corpening, 1832-1911, the wife of a colonel: “Her life was spent for others,” reads the inscription on her gravestone.

The inscription was clearly meant as a compliment. I wondered how that self-sacrifice played out in her real life.

A celebrated mason in early Fayetteville, a man of character

The last stop on our tour, about 3.5 miles southeast, is Cross Creek No. 1, located at Grove and North Cool Spring streets downtown. It is on the National Historic Register, and The Fayetteville Observer once described it as “As old as just about any piece of man-made local history.”

A James Hogg donated land to the Village of Cross Creek on Aug. 7, 1784, according to local records. The oldest stone is inscribed Sarah Brunlow (or Brownlow). She was 25 when her story ended on Jan. 5, 1770.

Some of the city’s early prominent citizens are buried here — among them, George Lauder, a stone mason who built many of the other headstones. Each of his works is considered a work of art by the National Historic Register, because of their unique style,

Lauder's own immigrant story is of note. He arrived in America from Scotland to help rebuild the capital, Raleigh, after a devastating fire in 1831. (This was incidentally the same year a great fire destroyed much of downtown Fayetteville .) Lauder would settle in Fayetteville, where he ran a successful stone business.

He never married, according to the website for the NC History Center on the Civil War, Emancipation & Reconstruction. But he wound up raising a house of five children. A close friend of his, John Smith, had died, and Smith’s wife had preceded him in death, dying from childbirth.

Lauder was the executor and legal guardian of his estate.

He was a respected member of the community, a member of local lodges and during Reconstruction after the war, the Postmaster General.

His story ended May 31, 1888, the History Center site said.

It continued: “His obituary was published in the Fayetteville Weekly Observer a week later, on June 7. It had been written by a long-time friend of his, who gushed about Lauder’s personality, his demeanor, and his character. The friend also stated that Lauder’s greatest accomplishment was the result of his most selfless act — raising John and Ellen Smith’s children after their parents’ deaths."

Opinion Editor Myron B. Pitts can be reached at mpitts@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3559.

This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: I visited Fayetteville’s historic graveyards. Here’s what I learned about our history.