From Revolution to today, cemetery at New Garden Friends Meeting tells story of America

The New Garden Friends Meeting cemetery contains a history lesson in every stone.

Of memorable moments influencing the founding of the United States.

Of Quakers who arrived from places like Pennsylvania, and helped shape their new land as well. At the dawn of the Revolution, Quakers, also known as Friends, governed half the colonies, including both Carolinas. Quakers organized the first public schools.

Among those laid to rest in the New Garden cemetery is one marked "George Howland Swain."

The young Guilford County abolitionist in the early 1800s South helped a slave successfully use the legal system for the first time in this country to gain his freedom.

Among the rows of other graves are non-Quakers but Quaker-connected, including a Jewish couple who escaped Nazi Germany with the help of Quakers. The husband, Curt Victorius, known as "Dr. Vickie," later chaired Guilford College's economics department.

The graveyard also includes the remains of two unknown Union soldiers who escaped from a Confederate prison and made their way to the New Garden community where, in spite of attention by Quaker doctors, they died.

Elsewhere in the cemetery are the mass graves of more than 125 British and American soldiers who died in the Revolutionary War Battle of New Garden in 1781.

After a number of skirmishes, including the better-known Battle of Guilford Courthouse, General Nathanael Greene and Lord Charles Cornwallis left their dead and wounded on the battlefield as they retreated, expecting the Quaker community to tend to them - and they did, according to Quaker and historian Max Carter. The Friends meetinghouse was used as a hospital.

Greene was also a Quaker who defied his upbringing to become one of the most celebrated American officers in the Revolutionary War. Greene's statue in the National Military Park honors his role in an important battle in the American war of independence, the Battle of Guilford Courthouse.

During battle, he wrote to the local Quaker community asking for provisions for his troops, which Carter says were provided out of human concern even while most Quakers refused to bear arms. But they also felt compelled out of human concern to assist British troops who fell in the battles.

Standing as a witness was a 30-feet in girth Revolutionary Oak, around which the New Garden cemetery grew.

The iconic tree was believed to be 450 to 500 years old in 1959, when it was felled by Hurricane Gracie.

Quakers had arrived in Guilford County decades before the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the city of Greensboro coming to life in 1808.

"Quakers had a profound impact of the culture, ethos and of even the religious understandings not only of North Carolina, therefore not only Guilford County, but almost half the colonies," Carter said.

"It wasn't just education, it wasn't just civil rights and the Underground Railroad," Carter said. "They took an interest in the economy and improving people's lives spiritually, economically and physically."

And it's reflected in the fading names of those who took their final rest in the New Garden cemetery.

So much of the area's and country's history is tied to the New Garden Friends cemetery that Carter decided to write a book about the people buried there. The retired director of the school's Friends Center enlisted the help of Gertrude Beale, who had been a researcher at Guilford College before her retirement and is an author of a book about the underground railroad.

The resulting "Tales from the New Garden Friends Graveyard," is in a second printing and available at Scuppernong bookstore and the New Garden Friends Meeting in Greensboro.

Graves at the meeting are also marked for Richard Benjamin "Rick" Ferrell (1905-1995) and his brother Wesley C. "Wes" Ferrell (1908-1976), considered two of the best professional ballplayers of their era. They were not Quakers but grew up on a local dairy farm under Quaker influences. Rick Ferrell was later elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

The cremated remains of Greensboro-born Quaker Mary Nicholson (1905-1943) are buried there. A Royal Air Force auxiliary pilot, Nicholson crashed in England while ferrying a plane from the warehouse to the airport.

Former Jefferson Standard Life Insurance Co. executive Seth Macon (1919-2016) spent time with Carter at the various historical sites connected to his family. When Macon was a boy, his father leased the fields surrounding their northern Randolph County homestead after fall harvests to wealthy people from the North, like the powerful banker J.P. Morgan, who would bring friends in their personal Pullman railroad cars to hunt pheasant, quail and rabbits, according to the book.

Carter later discovered one of his favorites, poet Randall Jarrell (1914-1965), who was a significant figure in local and national history and once taught at UNCG. The non-Quaker, who served in the military and wrote the poem "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," had asked to be buried among Quakers.

The book also recounts the story of Mary Mendenhall Hobbs (1852-1930), one of the most important women of her age and the wife of the first president of Guilford College, who petitioned the legislature and lobbied people of influence for educational opportunities for females, with the resulting Woman's College - now UNCG - opening in 1891.

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