Hidden in plain view

On Saturday evening the blog followed the Odd Fellows link to the abandoned Odd Fellows Cemetery on Shorefair Drive. Here we found what we expected: the largest African-American cemetery in Forsyth County, utterly abandoned. What was striking was that there appeared to be no plan in place. It was as if one day there were well-dressed mourners sitting on neat blue folding chairs (the chairs are still there), then everyone went home, and that was that. The grave markers recorded burials from the early 20th century through 1980, but most of the markers were from the 1920s through the 1950s. We need information! We know that the nearby minor league baseball stadium, Ernie Shore Field, was built in 1956, but need dates for the fairgrounds across the street (Wikipedia says 1952) to start putting events into a meaningful sequence. Meanwhile, Mr. Covington's grave marker is a record of the importance of fraternal organizations in African-American society after the Civil War. Mr. Covington was not only an Odd Fellow, but also a Knight of Pythias...