Our History

Founded in 1950, the Mary E. Smith Memorial Cemetery stands as more than a burial ground. It is a keeper of memory, a place where the stories of Black families, veterans, community leaders, professionals, and activists remain rooted in the soil of Northern Kentucky.

Located on 67 Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. in Elsmere, Kentucky, the cemetery was dedicated to Mary E. Smith (1866–1950), mother of co-founder Rev. Edward Smith. In the decades since its founding, it has become the final resting place of generations whose lives helped shape the communities around them, even when their names were too often left outside the pages of traditional history books.

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Among those buried here are World War I veterans Ferdinand DeSota Blackburn, Rev. Oscar H. Huggins, William Lambkins, and Dr. James E. Randolph; Black men who served their country during an era when the freedoms they defended abroad were not always afforded to them at home.​

 

The cemetery also holds the stories of people who built, served, healed, led, and challenged their communities. Dr. Percival L. Bacchus was a longtime physician in Newport. Elizabeth Berry Delaney owned the E. B. Delaney Funeral Home. Brandent Englemon carried his Northern Kentucky roots onto the football field at the University of Michigan. Alice Thornton Shimfessel became an important voice in Northern Kentucky’s Civil Rights movement.

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Perhaps the cemetery’s best-known resident is William H. “Che” Payne (1943–1970), a Covington native and Civil Rights activist who became involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the turbulent struggle for racial justice of the late 1960s. His life, though brief, became part of a much larger story of Black resistance, courage, and the demand that America live up to its promises.

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To walk through Mary E. Smith Memorial Cemetery is to walk through pieces of Northern Kentucky history that cannot be fully understood through buildings, monuments, or textbooks alone. Here rest people who fought wars, cared for neighbors, built businesses, raised families, broke barriers, and demanded change.

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Their stories did not end when they were laid to rest here.

 

In many ways, this sacred ground is where we are invited to remember them again.