06/03/2026
There’s a lot of history in Chatham’s cemeteries, and CCHA’s cemetery team is out there “unburying” it. This grave marker has the earliest known inscribed death date in Chatham County--1774.
This spring, the CCHA cemetery team, led by Julie King-McDaniel, made it a priority to thoroughly document the Napton cemetery, located off Siler City-Glendon Road in Matthews Township. This early cemetery was associated with the Quaker Napton Meeting, which split off from Cane Creek in 1780. Some believe that the church may have been established as early as 1751 and may have been the first church established in what is now Chatham County. Records show that a church and schoolhouse were active at Napton as late as 1864.
The Napton cemetery is noted for containing the Chatham grave marker with the earliest death date recorded on an original marker --1774. Hannah was the daughter of Charles and Margaretta Von Cullen White, immigrants from Pennsylvania who were very early Chatham inhabitants. Many of the unmarked burials in Napton are likely older than Hannah’s. It is not known when the site became used for non-Quaker burials.
Another unusual marker in the Napton cemetery is that of “Dowd’s George,” a hatmaker named George who was enslaved by Samuel Dowd. Samuel Dowd’s will instructs his executors:
that my negro man George shall be so far free as to enjoy the fruits of his own labor subject to the control and under the protection of my executors, and if at any time he shall become unable to maintain himself my executors shall be authorized to claim as much off of the lands which I have devised to my son Horace Q. Dowd as will maintain him.
In addition to documenting all of the inscribed markers in the cemetery with photographs, Julie made a thorough count of Napton’s many uninscribed fieldstone markers. Brush and leaf litter, which obscured many of the graves, was removed from the site by a volunteer team from the J.R. Lane Society in February. Julie followed up by marking all of the now-visible markers with flags, and then by photographing every marker that had any kind of inscription. She also prepared a map of the cemetery, indicating the locations of the inscribed markers. Her work revealed a total of at least 179 graves (additional unmarked graves are possible), including 55 readable markers. The first burial with an inscribed date is Hannah’s 1774. The most recent occurred in 1931.
Earlier visitors to Napton had reported some of the inscribed grave markers—but not all—and the number of graves marked by uninscribed fieldstones had not been recorded. We are pleased to have a photographic record of the inscribed markers, most of which are made of local stone and would have been inscribed by local persons with appropriate tools—such as blacksmiths or leather workers. Commercially produced markers came much later.
There's more information and additional photos of the Napton cemetery on our CemeteryCensus.com site:
https://cemeterycensus.com/nc/chat/cem222.htm
Photo of Hannah White's marker by cemetery project volunteer Tom Miller.
You can read more about our cemetery project in CCHA's May Newsletter:
https://chathamhistory.org/resources/Documents/PDFs/CCHANewsletters/2026NewsletterIssue2May.pdf
We'd love to have your help--locating remote sites that haven't been documented or photographing church cemeteries. Please contact us if you can help: [email protected]
