Historic Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh

In historic Oakwood Cemetery’s 140 years of existence, it should not be surprising to learn that the grounds are the final resting place for 22,000 people, among them seven former governors, five U.S. senators, eight North Carolina Supreme Court justices and four Civil War generals. 

And, oh, it also is the resting place of North Carolina State University basketball coach Jim Valvano (see lead-off photo) and Lorenzo Charles, who scored the winning basket for Valvano’s NCAA championship team of 1983. Valvano died of cancer in 1993; Charles died in an accident while at the wheel of a 2011 tour bus in which he was the only occupant.

They are buried in the Cedar Hill section along Locust Avenue. (If you want to visit the cemetery and find certain graves, it’s best to determine whose graves you want to find, then search online for their burial section. Once in the cemetery, consult a section map the cemetery provides online.)   

In fact, Lorenzo Charles’ grave (see first photo below) is a very short distance — perhaps 15 yards — from that of his coach. In the second photo below, you can see Valvano’s monument in the foreground with Charles’ monument (look for the NCSU red colors) left of Valvano’s in the distance just below the ridge. 

Being a sports fan, my primary focus was finding the Valvano and Charles grave sits. I spent a good two hours roaming the cemetery and its perimeter; I have to note the latter because it was difficult to find an opening to the grounds. And then once inside, it took another long while on foot to find a way to reach the largest section of the cemetery. I could have taken far more pictures if I’d known the layout ahead of time, but alas, I foolishly did not scout such things beforehand.

Actually, I had a secondary (or primary?) purpose for heading to that part of the north Raleigh downtown fringe on Wednesday. I was hoping to do a photo profile of St. Augustine’s University, a former longtime degree-granting Historically Black College or University. 

That’s a story for a subsequent post, but for now, I’ll say that St. Augustine’s on-site operations have been shut down since going into bankruptcy, and private campus security would not grant me access to the interior campus. So the few campus shots I did make were taken from what I could access outside the school’s chain link fence surrounding the grounds along Oakwood Avenue.

Oakwood Cemetery covers 72 acres, 30 of which remain available for future graves, according to its website. Not surprisingly, it is part of the Oakwood Neighborhood, to which I was introduced recently when it turned out that one of my stately homes photographed while walking the Blount Street Historic District was just inside the Oakwood borders. 

I didn’t find the graves of any of the state Supreme Court justices or U.S. Senators, but I did come across the resting places of former Gov. Charles Brantley Aycock and former North Carolina Attorney General Bartholomew Figures Moore. And of the two, the monument for Moore (in the Battle Section) was far more extravagant (see first three photos below). 

Moore’s monument even contains a bust of the attorney general, often referred to as the “father of the North Carolina bar.” He is remembered for leading the legal team that compiled and revised the state’s statutes.

Aycock, whose monument is in the Beechwood Section and shown in the fourth photo below, today is a controversial figure in North Carolina history. He was championed for being “the education governor” because of his advocacy of improving public school education in North Carolina and for his post-gubernatorial travels promoting educational causes. 

But he had a reputation as a segregationist and has been singled out as the person most responsible for the horrific Wilmington Massacre, a November 1898 bloody municipal government coup in a city that had several African American political leaders. At the time, black residents also outnumbered white residents in North Carolina’s then-largest city. 

For the longest time, a statue of Aycock sat in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the U.S. Capitol Building as one of two honoring North Carolina notable citizens. In the early 2020s, amid the national Black Lives Matter movement, North Carolina replaced the statue with one of evangelist Rev. Billy Graham. 

And while I didn’t find any graves of specific military generals, I did find and photograph a section of the cemetery dedicated to the graves of Confederate Civil War soldiers. 

The remainder of my pictures were composed for landscape purposes, often focusing on interesting juxtaposition or collections of like monuments against open space or under trees. To view a full gallery of images from the shoot, follow the link in this sentence. 

Above and below: Photos of the Confederate Civil War dead in an (appropriately) southern section close to Oakwood Avenue.