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Cemeteries, Monuments, and Bridges (2.5)

Description (2.5.1)

In addition to Elizabeth City's residential and non-residential buildings, which make up virtually all of its built environment, there is a small but significant number of sites and structures surviving from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These consist primarily of cemeteries, monuments, and bridges.

Cemeteries are important elements of the man-made landscape in Elizabeth City. Since there is no native stone in the Albemarle region, ail the gravestones are imported, probably from the mid Atlantic states and New England. Examples of gravestone carvings from stone cutters in Baltimore, New York, Norfolk, and Elizabeth City are represented: however, most gravestones are unsigned.

Two of the city's cemeteries originated in the early nineteenth century. The oldest cemetery is the Baptist Cemetery (300 block West Colonial Avenue), located at the rear of First Baptist Church (300 West Main Street). Only nine gravestones remain, ranging in dates from the 1810s to the 1870s; over fifty graves vere moved with their stones to Hollywood Cemetery in the 1920s. The city's major nineteenth century burying ground is the Episcopal Cemetery (505 East Ehringhaus Avenue). Buried here are many of the leading figures in Elizabeth City's history from the 1830s through the 1950s. It dates from 1828 and contains notable examples of funerary monuments and fences from the mid and late nineteenth centuries; several Gothic Revival obelisks and monuments are particularly striking. It also has a large number of elaborate cast iron fences from the mid nineteenth century that comprise one of the finest such collections in the Albemarle region. These early fences are complemented by a variety of wrought iron and heavy wire fences from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A lush canopy of trees--particularly magnolias--completes the restful, park-like setting.

Hollywood Cemetery (South Road Street at Peartree Road) was founded in 1872 and was the city's primary white graveyard until the 1950s. As Hollywood Cemetery has been the repository of graves and gravestones moved from abandoned family cemeteries both in the city and the county, its canopy of deciduous trees shelters monuments that reflect funerary traditions from the 1830s through the present.

Oak Grove Cemetery (1200 and 1300 blocks Peartree Road) is the oldest black cemetery in Elizabeth City. Dating from the late nineteenth century, it is the burying ground for many of the city's leading black citizens and contains traditional funerary monuments from the 1880s until the 1960s.

Several small family cemeteries remain within the city. The Charles-Herrington Cemetery (1100 Herrington Road) contains fourteen stones from the 1840s through the first decade of the twentieth century. Among the earlier monuments are several large "table-top" markers, one displaying beautifully articulated religious scenes. The Whitmel Lane Cemetery (319 Culpepper Street) contains six graves of members of the family of Whitmel Lane (1824-1901), an antebellum free black carpenter and a prominent black citizen.

The Confederate Monument south of the Pasquotank County Courthouse (206 East Main Street) was erected in 1911 to honor the county's dead in the Civil War. Consisting of a tall granite obelisk topped by an infantryman who faces south, the monument has a commanding presence in a small park between the courthouse and the post office. It is the only public monument in the city.

Since the Pasquotank River and Knobbs, Poindexter, Tiber; and Charles creeks played critical roles in the growth and development of Elizabeth City, bridges across these waterways have been important since the early nineteenth century. Two bridges of historical significance remain, both of which replaced earlier frame structures. The older is the Elizabeth City Bridge (East Elizabeth Street at Pasquotank River, 1931, Sam Liles, head engineer). The original two-lane Bascule-Leaf drawbridge, with a span of ninety feet, is supported between large concrete pylons that connect to piling-supported causeways at each end. Subtle Art Deco motifs are seen in the detailing of the pylons and in the gentle arch of the two forty-five-foot-long metal roadways that rise as the drawbridge in the middle. Modest Art Deco motifs also enliven the Charles Creek Bridge (Riverside Avenue at Charles Creek, 1940), a two-lane automobile bridge approximately seventy feet long carried by wooden pilings. These decorative elements are seen on the poured concrete pylons and the arched balustrade of the railing. While bridges at one time spanned the much smaller Poindexter and Tiber creeks in several spots, both of those creeks have now been completely covered by culverts; the former was covered in the 1920s to form East Elizabeth Street.