Minutes of the Friends of the Geer Cemetery 03/03/2008
At the Home of Jessica and David Eustice
809 Colonial Street, Durham

Members Present: R.Kelly Bryant, John Compton, Ron Bartholomew, Allen Dew, David Eustice, Jessica Eustice

Ownership of the Cemetery ~
Jessie recounted a phone conversation she had with Kevin Lilly of General Services on 2/5/08:
This information must be qualified by the fact that some of it is from memory, and some of the numbers may be rounded. So, keeping that in mind, Mr. Lilly's information was this:

The 1993 Durham County Tax Reevaluation listed the tax value of the property as approximately $22,800.00 with owner unknown. The 2001 Tax Reevaluation identified the property as a Cemetery (and therefore protected under NC and Durham City Cemetery Laws) owner still unknown, tax value $100.00.

This lower tax value was done so that the property would roll over each year as having unknown owner, but be protected from development. ( I assume so that the unpaid tax would not accumulate to an amount that only a develpoer could pay.)

Durham City Council and Durham County Commissioners met and decided that Durham General Services would continue to maintain the Cemetery at a basic level roughly 4 times a year. general Services used to contract with TROSA to maintain it, but in the last year or so, Gereral Services has done the work itself

Mr. Lilly said that if there is an interested party in taking this over, they would need to do the research to find out who the owner of the property was. I told him that we had done that research and we have a copy of the 1877 deed selling it to Willis Moore, John O'Daniel, and Nelson Mitchell.

Mr. Lilly said that if an owner or owners of the property came forward to make their wishes known and reclaim the Cemetery, and the City and County deemed it appropriate, General Services would relenquish maintenence to the owner.

I mentioned that we, the FOGC, might like to partner with the city, and another orgaization like the Preservation Durham, to restore the cemetery as best we could. In that case, Mr. Lilly said, there is a Non Profit that works with General Services, called Keep Durham Beautiful. He suggested we might work with them.

Newspaper Advertisement ran for 4 weeks in the Herald Sun:
Jessica donated the funds to place a special Notice in the Herald Sun on 2/8/08. It ran for 4 weeks. It read as follows:
"Friends of the Geer cemetery request deed holders come forth to help in deciding future options. (919) 680-4919"

Next steps Options:
Publicity is needed to keep the community informed. Will Jim Wise, John McCann and/or Albert Wiley help us? We need to locate people who may hold titles to cemetery plots. Options we considered were:

• Go to the register of deeds office and search death certificates to try and locate names of relatives who may hold deeds.
• Funeral Homes?
• Burial Cards digitized by city.
• Could we publicize the list of deaths from Allen's website on channel 17. John Compton will contact channel 17.

Signage:
About the sign for the Cemetery: Ron has a piece of stone that he would be thrilled to . donate to the Geer Cemetery. It has two engravable sides so history could go on one side of the stone. Ron will put the lettering on it.

Raleigh has a similar cemetery with a stone with history on the back.

R. Kelly Bryant Jr. suggested we accept the donation.

Jessie made a motion to accept Ron Bartholomew's generous offer of a stone with the words Geer Cemetery engraved on it.

David seconded the motion.

The motion carried unanimously.

Ron Bartholomew asked for Mr. Bryant's input on the design, understanding that a brick structure will probably be included in the final design for an entrance.

Next meeting we will walk around the cemetery to look at options for where to place the stone.

Volunteers:
Ron Bartholomew has again generously offered help with his crew. He is very sensitive to the needs of the cemetery and the preciousness of the stones. He would like to go in with his crew and take a sort of inventory of what is very delicate and what can and cannot be done by volunteers. An Archeologist might be a real good help deciding what to do about sunken graves and possible buried stones. We will try to contact John Clauser.

Ron wonders if we might sponsor a Volunteer Day in fall or late summer to do some of the simpler repairs.

Mr. Bryant Motioned we accept the suggestions of the Durham Marble Company about how to reset fallen stones and grave markers and accept whatever suggestions Made by Ron Bartholomew.

Boundaries:
The Cemetery is mapped by the City of Durham on their GIS website. We will use that to create the grid map.

New Business:
John Compton of preservation Durham suggests the FOGC get some help from people experienced in pulling together all the different kinds of information we need to help devise a budget and design a fundraiser using publicity on the Duke Park list serve and the FOGC List-serve to ask for feedback and creating a wish-list first before devising a budget, would be a good idea.

Arial Photographs from the thirties or forties might show the burial patterns.

Meeting adjourned at 6:20 pm.

Next meeting will be held on Monday April 7, 2008 - 4:00 P.M. Jessie and David's house

Minutes submitted by Jessica Eustice, 3/10/08