Creek Stand AME Zion Church Cemetery

Creek Stand AME Zion Church Cemetery. Macon County. Creek Stand's earliest African-American pioneers and their descendants are buried here. Oral history indicates that many slaves were buried here generations before the original church was constructed in 1895. These ancestors came to Macon County from 1820 to 1850 with their slaveholders during "Alabama Fever" and made vital contributions to establishing and sustaining the new settlement. After the Civil War, these former slaves adopted surnames from slaveholder settlers such as Dr. James E. Ellison who donated and sold land for the church building in 1893 and 1894. Trustees of the new church included Russell Dawkins, Stephen Pace, Sidney Mahone, George Washington Pace, and Taylor Robinson. Several of the community's first African-American landowners may have donated land that established the church cemetery. , The slave burial ground lies within the flat grassy area located near the original church site and extends into the adjacent woods. The wooded portion was once a clear area that families regularly maintained through the late 1950s. Since then this area has become overgrown and graves are no longer visible. Several weathered headstones with illegible inscriptions have been found in the woods. The oldest legible markers date to the early 1900s and reveal a continuity of surnames from the past to the present. This connection indicates the ancestors' enduring kinship because of the closeness among neighboring farms and the lifelong bonds formed through marriage and church membership.Listed in the Alabama Historic Cemetery Register.