Evergreen Cemetery

It’s all thanks to an $8,000 grant which will help with up-keep at the Evergreen Cemetery.The money comes from the Village of Owego being one of the winners of this year’s Preserve New York Grant.Tioga County officials and the Village of Owego will be using the grant money to hire professional services to complete a landscaping report and preservation plan.Evergreen Cemetery Committee officials say preserving the cemetery’s historical and cultural significance is the most important part of this task.“The great philosophers talk about pride of place and the treatment of dead as an integral component of building village community and nurturing ones children, so philosophically it is extremely important,” says Peter Gordon of the Evergreen Cemetery Committee.The grant money will also be used to restore deteriorated parts of the 168-year-old cemetery. ...

Amid the tangles and snarls of melancholic vines and ivy lies the final resting place of true civil rights and women’s rights pioneers, long forgotten by the tens of thousands of Richmonders that live nearby.Established in 1891, Evergreen Cemetery was a 60-acre necropolis intended to be the African-American equivalent of the neighboring and better known Hollywood Cemetery. Though the vaults, mausoleums, and grave markers of Evergreen Cemetery are unkempt today, the resting place is rich with history. Within these somber grounds of marble and vine, grave and grove, are memorials to educators, philanthropists, and civil rights leaders that helped sculpt a better world for future generations. Here you will find the graves of activists and community leaders such as Maggie L. Walker, John Mitchell Jr., A.D. Price, Reverend J. Andrew Bowler, and many other Richmond pioneers.For decades Evergreen Cemetery was neglected and left to nature, but in recent years efforts have begun to save the burial ground. Cleanups of Evergreen began in 2008, and in 2017 the cemetery was purchased by the Enrichmond Foundation, which helped to solidify the grueling task of returning this historic ground back to its former beauty.