Old Summit Cemetery contains the graves of a once-thriving Black community – people whose lives reflect a long history of adversity and endurance in the South.
Some are known by name; many are not. Together, they form a record of a community that built lives in what was once rural Hamilton County – then lost much of it, piece by piece, to forces beyond their control.
Local researcher Jared Story, whose family is connected to the cemetery, says the people buried at Old Summit were largely working-class African Americans, many born in Georgia and Alabama who migrated north in the late 19th century seeking land and opportunity, as well as refuge from racial violence and tightening Jim Crow laws.
Some had first settled in Chattanooga during Reconstruction, when Black political and economic life briefly flourished, before moving outward to places like Summit, where land could still be claimed and communities could take root.
A place built and unmade
By the 1890s, Summit had become one such place – a stable and growing Black community anchored by churches, a school and small businesses.
The cemetery, established around that same time, served as a shared resting ground for families connected to St. Peter Missionary Baptist Church, Fields Chapel AME Zion Church and Mt. Olive Primitive Baptist Church, as documented in Story’s research.
Today, that community is largely gone, and what remains scattered and uneven. A handful of headstones still stand, their inscriptions legible, while many more have been weathered into silence.
A 1938 Works Progress Administration survey recorded more than 200 burials at the site, most of them unmarked. The majority of those buried at Old Summit are known only in fragments – death records, family histories and traces in the landscape: fieldstones pressed into the earth, bricks half-swallowed by soil, shallow depressions and seasonal plantings like daffodils that return each spring to mark what stone does not.
Names that remain
Among the known individuals is Thelma Woods Espey (1912–1932), who died at just 22 years old. Her father, Milton J. Woods, worked as an engine watchman for the Southern Railroad and is believed to be buried nearby in an unmarked grave.
Their proximity – one marked, one not – captures the incomplete nature of the record at Old Summit, where families are preserved only in part and memory must bridge the rest.
Two of the earliest marked graves belong to Ollie Mae Edmondson (1903–1919) and Eunice Edmondson (1898–1919), sisters-in-law who died within months of each other from tuberculosis.
Their deaths, recorded in 1919, offer one of the earliest fixed points in the cemetery’s timeline, though many of the unmarked graves surrounding them likely reach further back.
Miles Wilson (1842–1928) was born before the Civil War, his life spanning slavery, emancipation and the uncertain promise of Reconstruction.
His burial here ties the cemetery to the first generation of African Americans who, having endured bondage, sought to build something enduring in its aftermath.
Another grave belongs to Ernest Franklin Lawler (1886–1932), a cook at a downtown Chattanooga restaurant and a member of the International Order of Odd Fellows. His headstone bears the organization’s symbol, offering a rare window into civic and fraternal life within the community.
His wife, Lula, is buried in the newer Summit Community Cemetery, established in 1944 – one of many families divided in death after access to Old Summit Cemetery was cut off during World War II, as Story’s research documents.
Also buried here is Aaron Standifer (1892–1925), along with others whose names survive only in partial records or on deteriorating markers.
Still others are known through occupation and association: laborers, domestic workers and men employed through the Works Progress Administration, including Archer Douglas and Jack Kimpson, whose lives reflect the economic realities of their time.
Families and legacies
One of the most significant family connections tied to the cemetery is that of Elizabeth Frost Brown, born in Maryland in 1854. Though her grave is unmarked and its exact location unknown, family history places her burial here.
Her story carries the weight of both survival and loss: After her family’s property in North Georgia was destroyed by racial violence, they resettled in Summit, building new lives on land that would later be taken by the federal government during World War II.
Her descendants went on to leave a broader mark – educators, soldiers, business owners and civic leaders. Among them were professor Norman Howard McGhee, a college president and leader in the Rosenwald school movement, Samuel McGhee, a Buffalo Soldier who served in the Spanish-American War, and Lillie McGhee Awtrey, whose descendants remain active in civic and social justice work in Chattanooga and beyond.
Other families connected to the cemetery include the Jones, Maston and Woods families, with additional ties continuing to surface through ongoing research and outreach led by Story.
What remains
Taken together, the lives represented here tell a larger story – of people who built a community in the decades after Reconstruction, sustained it through segregation and saw it dismantled by wartime land seizures and later development.
What remains is not just history, but presence, says Linda Moss Mines, member of the Tennessee Cemetery Commission.
“Cemeteries are living textbooks,” Mines says. “Every one of these people has a story. And when we stop saying their names, that’s when they really die.”