Was Festival Park built on top of an Indian burial ground?

TanJa Mercer found a curious thing, a mystery: Festival Park on Ray Avenue in downtown Fayetteville may once have been the site of an American Indian burial ground and, later, a city trash dump.

She wanted to know if the site had been an Indian burial ground, and she also wanted to know why a dump would have been put there. So she contacted “FayWHAT?” — the Observer’s new initiative where readers suggest story ideas and a member of the reporting staff tries to find the answers.

Specifically, Mercer asked: “How did the city dump end up on top of an Indian burial ground and what became of those remains and was it our local Cherokee tribe?”

She had seen the information on The Fayetteville Observer’s website this summer. The caption of a photo of the old United Service Organization club on Ray Avenue in 1945 says, “In the early 1900s this was the site of the city dump. Prior to that, it was an Indian Burial ground.”

Festival Park opened in April 2007 and brought the city a vast green space, concert stage and musical amphitheater along the banks of Cross Creek.

Have people there literally been walking and dancing on the graves of Indians during its use a concert venue and festival space, and for the decades when it housed a recreational club for soldiers?

The short answer to Mercer’s question: The caption appears to be wrong. But it can’t be definitively ruled out, either.

In several days of research plus the assistance of three librarians at the Cumberland County Public Library, this reporter has not been able to find any evidence that the American Indians who lived on the land that now is Festival Park had burial grounds or a cemetery there.

The research included interviews with the city historian and an archeologist, a search through a Fayetteville history book, examination of local maps dating to the 1700s, searches in newspapers from the 1800s and early 1900s, and examination of other records.

• • •

(Story continues below the question form.)

So how did that information appear in the caption?

Ask the man who made the photo: Weeks Parker Jr. of Fayetteville. Parker has been taking photos of Fayetteville for decades. He was here in September 1945 when a huge flood brought the Cape Fear River to the downtown area.

The USO club, built a few years prior on Ray Avenue near Cross Creek, had water in its front yard. Parker took a photo of the flooding and in the summer of 2008 gave a copy of it to The Fayetteville Observer. He provided the caption that describes the site as previously being home to a city dump and an Indian burial ground.

Parker said this month he had read about the dump and burial ground in The Observer and so put that information in his photo caption.

“But I just can’t remember when I saw the article. I even cut it out, and now I can’t find it. I misplaced it,” Parker said. “But I would sure like to know who wrote the article and when it was.”

Parker’s photo was published in The Fayetteville Observer in summer 2008 and included the caption about the burial ground. Another reader in 2008 saw the photo and asked the Observer’s “Live Wire” question-and-answer column about it. Like Mercer, that reader, too, wanted to know what happened to the human remains in the burial ground.

“Were the bodies respectably relocated?” the reader asked.

Parker in 2008 told the Live Wire columnist that he had seen the burial ground information in The Fayetteville Observer in the prior year or two. The columnist said she searched for the article but could not find it.

This reporter this month searched internal electronic archives of The Fayetteville Observer that date to 1987. No item, other than the photo from Weeks Parker and the 2008 query to Live Wire, said the site had been home to a town dump or an Indian burial ground.

Similarly, nothing about a burial ground or dump was found among clippings of news articles about the USO that are stored in the newspaper’s in-house library. Those articles run from the mid-1970s into the early 2000s.

But the absence of information in the newspaper’s archives doesn’t rule out the possibility that a burial ground was there.

Where to turn next?

• • •

A call was placed to Bruce Daws, the city historian. He had no information to say Festival Park was built on top of an Indian burial ground. If there were a burial ground there, Daws said, the Festival Park site would have been subject to an archeological study in the early to mid-2000s in advance of its construction.

Ken Robinson, who was Fayetteville’s historic resources planner in the 1980s and an archeologist, said he had no memory of what is now the Festival Park area being the site of a city dump or an Indian burial ground.

“It’s not unusual to find an occasional Native American artifact along the creek,” Robinson said, such as pottery or a spear point, “because there’s a long pre-history of Native Americans living in this area and they would have made camps along the creek, close to the creek.”

People often assume just because they find American Indian artifacts that they have discovered a burial ground, Robinson said. Actual burial grounds are rare, he said.

In this region of North Carolina, according to various accounts, an “Indian burial ground” typically is a burial mound. There are reports of their discovery in the Fayetteville area going into the 1800s. Some are mentioned in “The Story of Fayetteville,” a history of the city and surrounding area that was first published in 1950.

None of the reports said Indian burial mounds were found on Cross Creek at or near where Festival park is now.

The 2002 edition of “North Carolina Archeology,” published by the North Carolina Archaeological Society, discusses burial mounds in this region and has a diagram of archeological sites in the Cumberland County area. None are at Festival Park.

In research for this story, the only reference found to any sort of mound in the vicinity of Festival Park was in an item that librarian Gaby Kienitz of the Cumberland County Public Library discovered in the April 2, 1896, edition of The Fayetteville Observer.

An article says a child found what appeared to be an Indian arrowhead in Cross Creek near the Masonic Lodge, and several years prior “a mound of Indian arrow-heads and pottery was found near the Masonic Lodge.”

The lodge is still on Mason Street, which is a few blocks long and intersects Ray Avenue at Festival Park.

The Cumberland County library has a map from 1770 that depicts the area that eventually became downtown Fayetteville. It shows roads, buildings, farmland, waterways and other geographic features in detail. Nothing on it appears to be a burial mound.

So if there is no sign of an Indian burial ground in the records, what about a city dump in the early 1900s?

• • •

The Fayetteville Solid Waste Department has no historical records, spokeswoman Jackie Tuckey said, and she has never heard of one being there.

Neither has city historian Daws.

“I can’t imagine them having a full-fledged dump there at that corner,” he said.

Old fire insurance maps in the Local & State History room of the Cumberland County library as well as old city directories show there were homes on Ray Avenue in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

The fire insurance maps, which detail the locations, shape and use of buildings, also show maintenance buildings and structures for the railroad line that runs through that vicinity.

Nothing on those maps looks like a city dump or landfill.

But the maps do depict something that could have led to confusion on whether a garbage dump was there. The Fayetteville Light & Power Co. had a gas manufacturing plant near the corner of Ray Avenue and Maiden Lane.

The plant operated there from 1859 to 1948, according to a story the Observer published in 2004 about Festival Park. And severely contaminated the soil with dangerous chemicals.

Articles from The Observer say 33,000 tons of contaminated soil were removed at a cost of $3.5 million.

Could it be that someone heard about the contaminated soil cleanup and thought it was from a city garbage dump?

We’ll probably never know.

If anyone has documentation or other evidence that an Indian burial ground or a city trash dump were ever located on what is now Festival Park, please contact “FayWHAT?” and we’ll follow up.

Staff writer Paul Woolverton can be reached at pwoolverton@fayobserver.com or 486-3512.