Payne's Happy Ending

A (relatively) cheery epilogue for the abandoned Payne’s cemetery. As Payne’s was on the way out in the 1960s, a new cemetery, National Harmony Park, was just starting out. National Harmony was open to all races, though most of the people interred there were African American. In 1966, the cemetery graciously became the new site of about 2,000 graves from Payne’s Cemetery. This transfer, though, was not unique. In 1960, National Harmony accepted the graves of 37,000 people from Columbia Harmony Center, another defunct African-American cemetery.