At the edge of Enterprise South Nature Park, the throaty engine of a four-wheeler blends with the steady drone of traffic on Interstate 75 as it moves along a bumpy, rock-strewn trail.
It passes between a pair of wooden gates, their white-painted planks hanging from rusted hinges on posts bound with sagging barbed wire. A white cross crowns one gate, where a missing sign leaves a rectangular patch of bare wood – likely once bearing the name “Summit Cemetery.” The other stands in disrepair, its cross toppled at its base.
At the fence separating the park from the interstate, the four-wheeler veers left, turning away from a towering billboard that rises above the tree line, its steel frame planted just beyond the burial ground, overlooking the interstate and the land below.
Beyond the gates and crude fencing that flank the trail lies a place in stark contrast to its active surroundings. Beneath dense stands of oak, chestnut and cedar, amid tangles of greenbrier that wind like a barbed serpent around old trunks and new growth, and under soft mounds of honeysuckle, pine needles and leaves, lie the dead of a community Chattanooga has nearly forgotten.
From the undergrowth, a handful of headstones emerge, marking some of the roughly 200 people buried there. “Pluck (sic) from earth to bloom in heaven,” reads one; “H.G.,” reads another, its letters roughly etched into a small, chipped slab.
Most of the dead lie unmarked, their remains hidden among stones, in shallow depressions in the earth, along broken fencing and beneath the trees.
Here lie the people of Summit – Black men, women and children whose lives trace the arc of Southern history from slavery through Reconstruction, Jim Crow and wartime displacement.
And now, more than 80 years after the last burial, the ground they rest in has become the center of ongoing discussions over what can – and cannot – be built around them.
Search for lost ground
If the story of Old Summit Cemetery were told as a novel, Jared Story would enter late – a minor character stepping into a narrative still unfolding.
Story is the former son-in-law of the late Tamara Woodard, whose great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth Brown, lies in one of the cemetery’s unmarked graves.
While Woodard was alive, she passed down to him an oral history of the place: how the people of Summit, a Black community established in the years following Reconstruction in the late 1860s and 1870s, buried their dead there and how, during World War II, the U.S. government seized a swath of land that included the Summit community through condemnation, taking private property for wartime production.
The land was never returned. Instead, after decades under federal control, it passed into local hands, with the city of Chattanooga and Hamilton County acquiring it in the early 2000s to develop Enterprise South Industrial Park and the surrounding nature park.
By then, many Summit families had resettled nearby, establishing a new burial ground for future generations.
Woodard, however, wanted to be buried in the original cemetery and asked Story and his wife at the time to take her there – a task that proved difficult, as the cemetery remains largely hidden, bordered on one side by the park’s Atlas Mountain Bike Trail and on the other by a narrow strip of private property pressed against the interstate.
With no direct roads, the only way in is on foot – along winding trails through the park or from the edge of a nearby subdivision.
When they finally arrived, Woodard was crestfallen at the condition of the cemetery, Story recalls.
“She called then–state Rep. JoAnne Favors and said, ‘How can we get this land back?’ Favors made some calls, and the property owner at the time called my mother-in-law and said, ‘You can be buried in the cemetery, but you’re not getting the land.’”
In the end, Woodard’s family was unable to grant her request. Access issues – and the time required to resolve them after her death in 2024 – made it impossible, Story says.
“I don’t want to speak for her, I believe part of it for her would have been an act of defiance to be buried here,” he says. “I also think she saw it as reconnecting the cemetery to the Summit community and her people. That was her wish, but we weren’t able to honor it.”
A threat emerges
Members of the Summit community and descendants of those buried at Old Summit Cemetery remained engaged in its fate for decades. Those with family members interred there continued to visit and even attempt maintenance as recently as the early 2000s.
Although Woodard’s family was unable to fulfill her final wish, another opportunity to honor her emerged in October, when Story read a Chattanooga Times Free Press article detailing a proposed land-use exchange involving portions of Enterprise South Nature Park and McDonald Farm in Sale Creek.
Under the now-canceled proposal, roughly 500 acres of inactive land within Enterprise South Nature Park would have been rezoned for industrial use. The parcel containing Old Summit Cemetery was included.
While researching what opponents dubbed the “land swap,” Story learned of a separate but related concern: a proposed road extension that would lengthen Hilltop Drive to relieve mounting congestion around Exit 11, an area strained by rapid development.
Engineers with Croy were studying routes connecting Hunter Road to Volkswagen Drive, creating a parallel corridor along Interstate 75 and offering another access point to the interstate and nearby employers, including Volkswagen.
The question, however, was where to put it. Early concepts brought the road uncomfortably close to Old Summit Cemetery, raising concerns that construction could disturb graves.
“The fenced area of the cemetery is on private property,” Story says, referring to land owned by developer John McDonald and Realtor Mitch Everhart. (Neither McDonald nor Everhart responded to requests for comment.) “I thought, ‘This is the bigger threat.’”
Determined to understand the risk – and possibly find a solution – Story began digging into the recorded history of the Summit community, its people and the cemetery itself. What he discovered suggested the cemetery’s true boundaries might not be visible at all.
A community displaced
As Story sifted through historical records, federal archives, newspaper accounts, genealogical data, engineering reports, family papers and other sources documenting the Summit community and its land, a picture emerged of a people shaped by displacement.
The Summit community began as a simple wood station along the East Tennessee and Georgia Railroad, a stopping point between Ooltewah and Tyner, Story writes in a working report titled “Old Summit Cemetery,” dated Dec. 17, 2025.
In the years following Reconstruction, it grew into a thriving settlement as Black families moved north from Georgia and Alabama, drawn by the promise of land and opportunity, and pushed by the tightening grip of Jim Crow, peonage and racial violence.
They built a community anchored by institutions. Churches came first – St. Peter Missionary Baptist Church in 1897, Fields Chapel A.M.E. Zion Church in 1898 and Mt. Olive Primitive Baptist Church No. 2 in 1908 – followed by a Rosenwald school that educated generations of children before desegregation.
Over time, grocery stores, service stations and motels dotted the area, reflecting a local economy built by and for residents. Summit also became a gathering place. Dance halls and roadhouses drew visitors from surrounding areas, and baseball was a central pastime, with multiple fields hosting games.
Old Summit Cemetery took shape nearby, likely in the 1890s, becoming the resting place for a growing, closely connected community.
In 1941, the trajectory of the community shifted when the federal government condemned more than 6,000 acres to construct the Volunteer Ordnance Works, part of the wartime effort to produce munitions.
A year later, in August 1942, another 3,375 acres were taken, including the northern portion of Summit, Mt. Olive Primitive Baptist Church and Old Summit Cemetery. Families were given as little as 30 days to leave. The land was fenced, access restricted and the cemetery – once a communal space of mourning and remembrance – was suddenly cut off.
“The Summit Community no longer had access to the cemetery for burials, maintenance or visits,” Story writes.
By 1944, three community members purchased land on Sanders Road and established a new burial ground – Summit Community Cemetery. From that point forward, the dead of Summit would be divided, sometimes within the same family.
The separation didn’t end there. In the years that followed, the construction of what is now Interstate 75 carved through the area, further isolating what remained of the original community. The former TNT plant continued operations until 1977, leaving behind environmental impacts that affected the air and water of nearby residents.
Even after the war, the land didn’t return to those who’d been forced from it. It passed through decades of industrial use before opening to civilian redevelopment in the 1990s. In the early 2000s, the city of Chattanooga and Hamilton County took ownership, transforming portions of the site into Enterprise South Industrial Park and Enterprise South Nature Park, while other parcels – including the narrow strip containing Old Summit Cemetery – were sold to private owners.
What remains today is a burial ground that serves as the physical trace of a community that once gathered, worshiped and laid its dead to rest on land it no longer controls.
Uncertain boundaries
The deeper Story looked, the more uneasy he became about what lay beyond the cemetery’s fence line.
In February 2025, Hamilton County commissioned a preliminary engineering study for the proposed extension of Hilltop Drive. The study reported no historical or archaeological resources along the proposed corridor. But to Story, that absence raised questions.
“The proposal could potentially encroach on the cemetery without an archaeological survey to verify the actual extent of burials,” he wrote in his working report.
Story and local resident Nathan Griffin, co-founder of Save Enterprise South Nature Park, brought their concerns to Graham Perry, a historic cemetery preservation specialist with the Tennessee Historical Commission.
Perry visited the site Dec. 18. His initial task was straightforward – to establish the cemetery’s general dimensions. What he found was less so. The burial ground, enclosed by a fence that appeared to define its boundaries, showed little internal order. Graves, both marked and unmarked, were scattered irregularly across the landscape, with no clear rows.
“The surrounding fence had apparently been put up after the cemetery was founded,” Perry said, raising the possibility that it didn’t capture the cemetery’s full extent.
After mapping the visible corners, he began to probe the ground beyond the fence line, looking for disturbed earth.
“You can’t say with 100% certainty that what you’re probing is a grave, but the directional facing and rectangular shapes of disturbed ground are usually a sound sign,” Perry wrote in an email to the Hamilton County Herald explaining how he identifies potential unseen graves.
What he found confirmed the concern that had drawn him there.
“At least two graves lay outside the cemetery’s current fence,” Perry wrote further, adding that such findings are not uncommon. “African American cemeteries have a tendency to spread out farther than their assumed boundaries. Often fences do not mark the exact perimeter.”
For Story, the discovery underscored what he and Griffin had begun to suspect.
“The problem is that there are numerous unmarked burials outside the fenced area – and we don’t know where the boundaries are,” Story says.
Another piece of the puzzle came into focus after Perry’s visit.
Through an open records request, Griffin obtained a Tennessee Department of Transportation schematic that offered a more detailed look at the area. What he saw raised new concerns.
“There’s a third portion of the cemetery that butts up against the right of way next to the billboard,” he says.
The implication was significant. If the cemetery extended that far, Griffin says, any proposed road would have to pass through one of three places: the nature park, the cemetery itself or the interstate right of way – none of them viable options.
Balancing growth and preservation
For now, the future of the proposed road remains uncertain.
Hamilton County Commissioner Jeff Eversole says engineers with Croy are continuing to refine plans for the Hilltop Drive extension, with the goal of addressing traffic congestion near Exit 11 without disturbing either Old Summit Cemetery or Enterprise South Nature Park.
Hilltop Drive currently dead-ends near Miller Industries, and officials have argued that extending it southwest along Interstate 75 from Hunter Road to Volkswagen Drive would provide an alternate route for commuters and improved access to major employers.
But for those who have studied the site more closely, the path forward is not so simple.
In his working report, Story notes that county officials have offered verbal assurances that the cemetery will not be impacted and that disturbing it would be illegal. At the same time, he points out that Tennessee law allows for the removal and reinterment of graves through the courts – a process the city has used before at another cemetery within the former TNT plant property.
That possibility, however remote, has done little to ease concerns among descendants and community members, many of whom remain focused on protecting the site and ensuring it is preserved, Story says.
Following his December site visit, Perry offered a series of recommendations shaped by what he observed on the ground. Chief among them: the cemetery should remain undisturbed.
Given the number of graves and the uncertainty of its full extent, Perry noted that relocating the cemetery would likely be costly and impractical. If a road is built nearby, he advised, it should follow the northern parcel boundary rather than the existing fence line, which does not appear to mark the cemetery’s true limits.
He also recommended that the property be formally designated as a tax-exempt cemetery parcel and that any development in the area proceed with extreme caution.
“If a grave is unearthed, the developer must cease construction immediately,” Perry said, outlining required notifications to law enforcement, public health officials and state archaeologists.
At the same time, the issue has drawn the attention of state historians.
Dr. Carroll Van West, director of the Center for Historic Preservation at Middle Tennessee State University, says Old Summit Cemetery is now part of a broader effort to document and preserve historic burial grounds across Chattanooga. After Story reached out in late 2025, the cemetery became the fourth site the center has studied in recent years.
West says no decisions about development should be made until the cemetery is fully documented and its boundaries clearly established.
“Any new plans for development on or surrounding the historic cemetery should be put on hold until the research is complete,” he adds.
West is also calling for restoration of the site, clear delineation of its boundaries and public access for interpretation and commemoration.
Taken together, the recommendations call for a deliberate, research-driven approach – one that runs up against the pressures of growth and infrastructure. For now, the question is not just whether a road can be built, but whether it can be built without disturbing what lies beneath the surface.
The land remembers
On the west side of Old Summit Cemetery, to the right as four-wheelers head toward the interstate, stands a post oak distinct from its neighboring trees. Where surrounding oaks, chestnuts and cedars rise tall and thin, their branches close to the trunk, this one spreads wide, its limbs reaching outward as if tracing the edges of the graveyard.
Local naturalist Richard Dube calls it a “Lone Wolf” and estimates it’s at least 80 years old. Its thick, sprawling branches, he says, suggest it once stood alone in an open field, free to grow outward as well as up, as the land filled in around it.
Though it’s spring, its branches remain bare, another sign of a landscape long left untended. Beneath it lie the dead – buried when Old Summit Cemetery was still a field.
They must not only be remembered, but honored, says Linda Moss Mines, member of the Tennessee Cemetery Commission.
For Mines, the meaning of Old Summit Cemetery goes beyond where its graves begin and end.
Standing among the trees and weathered stones, she sees a place where a community once gathered – in death as well as in life. A place where families returned, again and again, to honor those who came before them. A place where memory still lingers in the soil.
“The land tells the story,” Mines says. “So much of history is rooted in both place and people, and a cemetery like this holds both. You can feel it. If you close your eyes, you can sense that this was once a place where people gathered.”
She pauses, then adds what she believes is at stake.
“It would be a shame to lose a historic, predominantly African American cemetery in what was arguably the most progressive city in Tennessee – and certainly much of the South,” she says. “What matters is that it be preserved, even as nature reclaims it, so descendants can come. Even if I don’t know exactly where my family member is buried, I can step into this cemetery and know they’re here.
“It’s important that we don’t forget yesterday while we’re focused on today and planning for tomorrow, because it’s all part of a continuous thread that binds us as humans. And when we break that thread, we lose our purpose in life.”
The Hamilton County Herald thanks naturalist Richard Dube for identifying the diverse tree and plant life at Old Summit Cemetery mentioned in this article.