Kernersville Honors Those Buried at Historic St. Paul's AME Cemetery

Most people driving down South Main Street in Kernersville never notice it. Tucked into a wooded lot where Cherry Street merges with Main, behind the Stafford House and next to Cagney's Restaurant, sits one of the oldest and most important burial grounds in town: St. Paul's AME Cemetery, a resting place for enslaved and free Black residents that dates to before the Civil War.

On Saturday, Nov. 7, from 9 to 10 a.m., the community will gather there for a wreath-laying ceremony the Kernersville Chamber of Commerce lists as "Honoring Our Local Heroes." The public event, held the weekend of the town's Veterans Parade, honors local heroes buried at the cemetery at 711 S. Main St.

A burial ground for a whole community

According to the Kernersville Historic Preservation Society, which maintains the site today, oral history holds that before the Civil War the graveyard was the burial place for virtually the entire Black population of the Kernersville community. The site covers a little more than an acre of heavily wooded land; Kernersville Magazine puts it at about 1.25 acres.

After the war, several Black members of the town's Methodist Episcopal Church founded their own congregation, St. Paul's Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1873 the new congregation bought a church building and moved it onto the cemetery grounds. It became the Black community's first place of worship and the third church established in Kernersville, according to the preservation society. In 1888 the congregation moved to a new building at Church and New streets, now a designated historic site, and the church building no longer stands at the cemetery.

A past census of the cemetery identified close to 200 graves, and a memorial plaque near the entrance lists the people who have been identified. Visitors should watch their step: many graves are marked only by simple field stones and small boulders, mostly toward the front of the site, placed by families before carved tombstones were common.

Sarah Hamlin's 30-year effort

Much of the cemetery's survival traces back to one woman. In a 2021 history piece for Kernersville Magazine, preservation society board member Bruce Frankel profiled Sarah Friende Hamlin, born in Kernersville in 1922, who was valedictorian of the first graduating class of Carver High School — the area's first accredited high school for Black students — and later ran Sackie's Florist and Gift Shop in Winston-Salem for 41 years. Many of her relatives are buried at St. Paul's, and her great-grandparents, George and Sarah Elizabeth Taylor, donated the land for the congregation's 1888 church, the magazine reported.

In 1990 Hamlin began clearing the overgrown brush and debris that had swallowed the gravestones. She kept at it for more than a decade before turning the cemetery's upkeep over to the Kernersville Historic Preservation Society in 2001, as her health declined. Asked whether any prominent citizens were buried there, she answered, as quoted by the magazine: "Everyone here is prominent."

Finding 88 unmarked graves

Since then, volunteers have carried the work forward. The magazine credits Paige Truelove with leading the effort in the years after Hamlin, and board member Chris Gaugler with directing restoration and maintenance more recently. The Town of Kernersville, civic groups, schools, Boy Scout troops and local businesses have all pitched in, and a Mt. Tabor Boy Scout troop and Eagle Scout candidate Jonathan Wearn added park benches and a trash-can platform.

In 2018 the society launched its Families and Friends Who Care Initiative, which asks families, businesses and community groups to adopt a month and clear trash and hard debris from the site.

The biggest discovery came in 2020. At the request of the Kernersville Museum, the engineering firm WithersRavenel volunteered its subsurface utility engineering team to survey the cemetery with ground-penetrating radar. The scan identified 88 unmarked graves and confirmed the locations of the marked plots. Volunteers used the survey to clear brush without disturbing burials, and the firm described longer-term plans for new markers and mapping data that could become wayfinding tools for visitors. The Kernersville Museum says a Kernersville granite company donated resources to help mark those graves.

Why it matters

The cemetery is one of a handful of projects that define the preservation society, which formed in 1982 as development in the 1980s was claiming many of the town's historic homes. Its other work includes the 1878 Piney Grove School House at Fourth of July Park and a partnership with the town on the Kernersville Museum in the Bodenhamer House on West Mountain Street.

Saturday's ceremony is a short, simple way to see the cemetery for yourself and to honor the people buried there. Afterward, the Kernersville Veterans Parade steps off on Sunday, Nov. 8, at 2:30 p.m. downtown.

If you go

• What: Wreath-laying ceremony, "Honoring Our Local Heroes"
• When: Saturday, Nov. 7, 2026, 9–10 a.m.
• Where: St. Paul's AME Cemetery, 711 S. Main St., Kernersville. The cemetery is hard to see from the road; look for the driveway beside the Stafford House, near Cagney's Restaurant, where Cherry and Main streets merge.
• Cost: Free, public community event. Details: Kernersville Chamber event page
• Visiting other days: The cemetery is open to the public. Some protruding rocks are grave markers, so stay on cleared ground.
• Volunteer: The Kernersville Historic Preservation Society welcomes help with cleanups through its website.