Known over the years as Twin Oaks, the Colored Cemetery and the African Cemetery, Oaks Cemetery has served Fayetteville’s African American community since shortly after the Civil War. Located next to Fayetteville National Cemetery, the first partial acre of Oaks Cemetery was acquired on July 4, 1867, “for the Colored people of Washington County,” with additional land purchased in 1924 and 1947.
With the latter purchase by the cemetery trustees, Oaks Cemetery was for the first time totally controlled by Fayetteville’s Black residents. The earliest birthdate on the 270 identifiable burials in Oak Cemetery is that of Margrett West, who was born in 1819 and died in 1913; she and others born in the early nineteenth century were likely formerly enslaved.
Several veterans are interred in Oaks Cemetery as is Lem McPherson, one of Fayetteville’s first black police officers who was killed in the line of duty in 1928, and poet George Ballard, who lies in an unmarked grave.
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Read the Encyclopedia entry at Oaks Cemetery - Encyclopedia of Arkansas.
