Piecing together the puzzle: An Oak Ridge burial for C.B. Lewis

Ten years after the founding of Rose Hill Cemetery in 1840, Macon’s City Council set aside acreage for the interment of enslaved and free people of color. This section is known as Oak Ridge Cemetery. 

Unlike other sections of Rose Hill, the city never created a map of burial plots for Oak Ridge, and many individuals were buried in unmarked graves. 

In one of the few marked Oak Ridge plots stands a large, capped column inscribed with the birth and death dates for C.B. Lewis and Lucinda Dawson. 

The epitaph reads “Another link is broken in our household band But a chain is forming in a better land.” 

The names Carter and Holley ( Holley’s name is spelled “Holly” in the inscription) are also carved into the stone.

This beautiful monument and its inscriptions raise the question, “Who were Lewis, Dawson, Carter and Holley?” 

Uncovering their identities required piecing together clues from several sources. 

The first puzzle piece I found was a death certificate. According to his gravestone, C. B. (Charles) Lewis was born on May 26, 1861, and died on December 26, 1891. 

A search of his date of death and name on Familysearch.org uncovered a death certificate for Charles B. Lewis, a waiter in Manhattan. The death certificate also noted plans to transfer the body for burial in Macon.

The second puzzle piece helped me connect the names. 

A legal announcement dated March 7, 1892 in the Macon Telegraph, noted that A.L. Carter filed a petition to be the executor of Lewis’ estate. 

The petition identifies Carter as Lewis’ stepfather; Carter’s wife, Laura, as Lewis’ mother; and Lizzie Holley as his sister. 

Carter most likely had to file the petition because in the 1890s, a Black woman faced significant barriers to being appointed as an executor of an estate, due to the prevailing racial and gender inequalities.

The 1900 census records — the third important piece of data — list Holley as the wife of  Charles Holley and states that her mother, Laura, and her stepfather, Augustus “Gus” (A.L) Carter, were living with Lizzie and her husband in the Pleasant Hill neighborhood on Madison Street. 

Laura and Lizzie were seamstresses, and Carter was a day laborer. Lizzie’s husband, Charles, was a mail carrier. 

The final piece of the puzzle is a 1923 Bibb County death certificate for Laura, listing Lucinda Dawson as her mother. 

This means that Dawson, who is buried in the same plot with Lewis, is his grandmother. The informant on the death certificate for Laura is her daughter, Lizzie Holley. 

C. B. Lewis died with $3,000 in his Brooklyn bank account. Today, that would be worth approximately $103,500. This is an impressive sum of money and plenty with which to purchase his beautiful tombstone and lot. 

In 2025, Liz Riley and Kathleen O’Neal began a visual inventory of every monument in Rose Hill Cemetery. The goal of this project is to provide a free, complete and accurate database of those interred, as well as maps for locating them. This column shares the fascinating stories discovered during this project.