The partnership that owns property containing the 1800s Ida Bell Cemetery near Mayflower (Faulkner County) recently stopped plans to develop land close to the cemetery.
So said broker Brooks McRae with McKimmey Associates Realtors of North Little Rock last week. McRae represents property owner Central Farms of Little Rock.
Central Farms planned to add to the River Plantation neighborhood near the cemetery, McRae said. The cemetery sits on about five of the 350 acres Central Farms owns in the area, he said.
River Plantation residents grew concerned that Central Farms might build where there are unidentified graves or obliterate a historic wagon trail there, so they formed Friends of Ida Bell to oppose the project, said group co-chairman Andrew Timmer.
Prince Fuller, associate minister of Palarm Chapel Missionary Baptist Church — the church that once sat within a half-mile of the cemetery — said the Planning Commission requested that Central Farms determine the boundaries of the cemetery prior to building.
Byron McKimmey, a partner in Central Farms, said the company was already reluctant to develop in the area due to the sour economy, so it took neighborhood opposition as a reason to drop the matter.
Leslie Stewart-Abernathy, who is an Arkansas Archaeological Survey archaeologist for territory that includes Faulkner County, said the cemetery sits on a hill south of Mayflower and contains more than 300 African-American graves. Not all the graves are marked, so the size of the cemetery is unclear.
Fuller, with the church that is now on Arkansas Highway 365, said the cemetery started as a slave graveyard on a plantation.
Central Farms will build houses near the cemetery as there is demand, McRae said.
“We would never develop the cemetery area at all, and we don’t plan on moving any graves or disturbing that area,” he said.
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