In Memoriam: A Registry of the Hilltop
“To be forgotten is to die twice. We speak these names so they may live forever in the memory of the pines.”
The Innocents: The Infants of Altare
We remember the children who lived only long enough to be loved, whose brief presence marked the struggle of rural life. They are the sons and daughters of a community that lacked the medicine, but never the mercy, to save them.
- Dilla Walker (1936) – Two months old
- Joe Willie Mosley (1921) – Three months old
- Will Julius Hunter (1930) – Six months old
- Willie Marshal Grass (1922) – One month old
- Alfred Salter (1929) – One month old
- Emma Lee Thames (1930) – Eight months old
- The Children of the Stillbirth Records: To the unnamed infants of the Chapman, Evans, and Johnson families—your lives, however brief, are woven into our soil.
The Taken: Victims of the Invisible Front
We honor those who fell to the fevers and the plagues that moved through the cabins. They were the youth in their prime and the parents in their strength, taken by the diseases of poverty and neglect.
- Lucindy Arrington (1920) – 14 years old, Typhoid
- Minnie Evans (1915) – 9 years old, Typhoid
- Anna Belle Ellis Evans (1918) – 21 years old, Influenza Pandemic
- Joanna Evans (1923) – 21 years old, Tuberculosis
- Sam Walker (1918) – 18 years old, Tuberculosis
- Lilla Amos McCord (1917) – 18 years old, Pellagra
- Dora Lee Evans (1923) – 4 years old, Measles/Fever
The Silenced: Victims of Injustice
We remember those whose lives were ended by violence and whose stories were often distorted or ignored by the records of the day. We restore their names to the light of truth.
- Armilla Flowers Evans (1924) – 20 years old. A daughter of Altare, remembered for her courage and her life beyond the silence of the headlines.
- Andy Moore (1905) – 18 years old. A young man whose potential was cut short on the red clay roads.
- Lawyer Evans – A son of the community whose name remains a testament to the fragility of peace in a Jim Crow world.
The Guardians of the Soil
We honor the Elders—the Founders—who endured the heat of the day so that the generations to follow could find shade.
- Francis Chapman Gibson (1927) – 76 years old
- Warren Evans (1955) – 72 years old
- Iley Jane Evans (1955) – 95 years old. The Midwife who caught the future in her hands.
These names are not a list of deaths. They are a record of how Altare lived.