Shelter Series: Tales and Tombstones of Sunset Cemetery
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Shelter Series: Tales and Tombstones of Sunset Cemetery on Tuesday, April 11 at 4pm
Join us for a conversation based on the book Tales and Tombstones of Sunset Cemetery: Tracing Lives and Memorial Customs in a Southern Graveyard. The conversation, between a journalist and an academic, will center around a cemetery in the North Carolina piedmont founded in 1841.
Joe DePriest relates the stories of the permanent residents of Shelby. His tales are of a co-founder of the local Ku Klux Klan; of Thomas Dixon, whose racist novels became The Birth of a Nation; of a paratrooper who died in the Battle of the Bulge; of country music legend Don Gibson and soul musician Bobby “Pepper Head” London.
June Hadden Hobbs writes about tombstones, cemetery design, and American deathways. She analyzes hymns and hands carved on tombstones, gender formation, how our ancestors coped with burying their young, and the Confederate monument on the nearby courthouse square. The presentation ends with a look at the “colored cemetery” of Sunset, where the bodies of around 300 souls lie in unmarked graves.
Registration is FREE, but required. Click here to register.