STARKVILLE, Miss.— Brush Arbor Cemetery, also known as the Starkville Colored Cemetery, is hidden among trees in a plot of land between the yellow shack that holds Scooter’s Records and the three-story building with Commodore Bob’s restaurant and liquor store on University Drive in Starkville. It is across the street from the far-better-maintained Odd Fellows Cemetery, where ornate stones and statues honor prominent white Starkvillians from the past.
In Brush Arbor, about 33 tombstones dated from 1882 to 1920 sit in patches of grass and dirt behind a bench and a Starkville land marker, erected in 2014, that details a timeline of the unfenced cemetery. More people could be buried at the location in unmarked graves, the sign says, considering noticeable indentations in the ground. The sign indicates no dog-walking in the cemetery, which has long been popular for that activity, but the Mississippi Free Press has observed owners allowing dogs to run loose among the remaining tombstones since the sign went up.
The cemetery’s full history is largely unknown, but Dr. Jordan Lynton Cox, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology and Middle Eastern studies at Mississippi State University, is leading a cohort of young researchers as they uncover the roots of the Brush Arbor Cemetery.
“Our work is vitally grounded in not only community engagement but decolonial practices and cultural heritage preservation,” Taia Bush, a senior at Carleton College, told the Mississippi Free Press on July 16.
Ten students from across the country came to Starkville for five weeks this summer to research the lives of those buried in the cemetery through the Brush Arbor Community-Engaged Field Program. The National Endowment for Humanities funded the three-year program, now in its first year.
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Joseph B. Earle bought land in Mississippi and Alabama during the 1830s and 1840s. One of his purchases included the area where the cemetery now resides close to Needmore, a historic Black community. The City of Starkville does not have any other records for this time.
The cohort of students learned that African American Baptists and Griffith Chapel Methodists formed Union Church on that land
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