Overview

The Old Drew Family Cemetery (defunct) was located in Brunswick, North Carolina on land that is currently part of the .

Important

This cemetery is a Historical Marker. Purportedly, all graves from the cemetery were relocated (please read below).

Relocation

In 1951, the U.S. Army began land negotiations with State/Brunswick County officials and the SENCland residents that would allow them to build a new Army and Air Force ammunition depot. The new $24 million dollar facility would covered 20,200 acres, run five miles inland, and stretch seven miles along the Cape Fear River.

By the end of 1952, residents of the new Sunny Point Reservation were bought out and relocated; mostly to areas in and around Town Creek.

In March 1954, under direction of the Army Corps of Engineers, the Swett & Roberts contracting firm, of Wake Forest, began disinterring and transferring graves located on the land to make room for the Sunny Point Ammunition Depot. At the time, the Old Drew Family Cemetery was described as being "neglected" with "the majority of the graves, most of them unmarked and overgrown with brush, pines and poison oak" of which one "bore a date of 1840."

The condition of the cemetery caused engineers to originally believe there were only 210 graves, but contractors uncovered an additional 150 graves over the 45-day period spent relocating the remains. This, along with three additional graves that were disinterred from the Marsh Branch Church Cemetery (African-American), brought the total to 363.

Of the 363 graves disinterred, two were reinterred at Bellevue Cemetery, one at Oakdale Cemetery, one in Southport, and the other 359 to a site donated by James Laurence Sprunt called New Drew Cemetery.

It was reported that, because of the large number of unmarked/unidentifiable graves relocated to the New Drew Cemetery, engineers made scaled drawings of the former and present burial sites and numbered each grave.