2024 Hometown Spirit Award Recipient

From Nominators:

100-year-old Miss Sallie Jones grew up in Cary, North Carolina on North Academy Street and lives there still today. She is a descendant of some of Cary's earliest African American families. A nearby farm was the site of graves of her family members – her grandfather’s father and family. After reaching adulthood, Sallie left Cary and taught for many years in Gary, Indiana. When she returned home to Cary after retirement, she discovered that these grave sites were gone, a housing development had been built in their place, and no one knew what happened to the burials. At the same time, the cemetery of the Cary First Christian Church was coming under development pressure. Sallie was concerned that the church cemetery would be lost. The church was small, and although the congregation tended the cemetery, it was unable to restore and keep up the cemetery, which had fallen prey over the years to vandalism and weather.

Sallie Jones made it her personal project to preserve the cemetery and thus the memories of the people buried there. The cemetery on West Cornwall Road had been on this site ever since the church started meeting on the grounds under a brush harbor around 1868. 

Once Sallie Jones determined to preserve the cemetery, she had the cemetery surveyed. She hired archeologists who used ground penetrating radar to discover over 160 unidentified graves. She then went on a quest to identify those buried in the unmarked graves. She combed through archives, census records, and North Carolina Department of Health records in the days before internet access to put names to some of the unknown persons buried there. Sallie Jones registered the site with the State of North Carolina so that the land could not be sold.

Sallie’s mission to preserve this important piece of Cary’s history took her over 25 years. Several years ago, Cary First Christian Church partnered with the Town of Cary and the Friends of the Page-Walker to showcase the cemetery and educate the community about the people buried there. Volunteers from the Friends of the Page-Walker worked alongside members of the community and the church to research the history of the cemetery and the people who are buried there. A walking tour brochure was produced to recount the lives and impact of the members of the African American community in Cary. Miss Sallie Jones was honored in the brochure as “a key contributor to the development of the brochure, the cemetery, and the people of Cary.” It became the first cemetery to be designated as a historic landmark in Cary and in all of Wake County.

If not for the heroic efforts of Sallie Jones, the Cary First Christian Church Cemetery and the history of Cary’s African American community might have been lost. We unreservedly recommend Sallie Jones for the Cary Hometown Spirit Award.