10/06/2026
Sometimes at Old Lick Cemetery, the smallest discovery opens the door to a larger story...and they aren't always by way of elaborate or commercially available marble markers.
Recently, while utilizing ground-penetrating radar to assist in identifying fallen markers, we noticed an indication beneath an otherwise grassy presumably unmarked area of the cemetery. There was little on the surface to suggest what might be there, but as we began carefully removing the sod and soil, we encountered pieces of concrete...and the probe indicated more in a linear fashion...
Slowly, the outline of a small, homemade grave enclosure began to emerge and take shape. Its narrow, formed-in-place concrete curbing, which still showed imprints of the original wood forms used, had broken into numerous pieces over the years. This portion of Old Lick lies just at the base of a remarkably steep grade—30 degrees or more in places—and decades of runoff, erosion, and downhill movement of soil have buried and displaced numerous markers. Here, the long sides of the rectangular enclosure, running perpendicular to the slope, had effectively acted as small retaining walls. Over time, the pressure of the soil moving downhill toppled both sides in the same direction, where they sank in place and eventually disappeared completely beneath the surface.
As we uncovered, raised and reset each of the pieces, one of them provided something far more important than the visual outline of a grave. Scratched by hand into the concrete was what name with some losses at the end:
"LUVENIA BUM…
.and that gave us somewhere to begin.
The little girl buried within the small concrete enclosure was Luvenia Bumpers, we we believe was born on March 1st, 1920, in Greensboro, North Carolina, to Eugene Bumpers and Mamie Young Bumpers. She was one of 8 children born to Eugene and Mamie, 5 of whom were born in the remarkably short period between July 30, 1917, and March 1, 1920—a run that included back-to-back sets of twins!
Following this family through the historical record presents an additional challenge: their surname was recorded in an extraordinary variety of ways. We encountered Bumper, Bumpers, Bumpus, Bumpas, Bumpis, Bumpass, and other variations, often in records referring to the very same people. This was not unusual in an era when names were frequently written down by clerks, census takers, physicians, registrars, and newspaper editors according to what they heard or understood. For this story, we use Bumpers when referring to Luvenia and her family generally, while preserving other spellings where they appear in individual historical records.
Eugene was born in North Carolina to Mulberry and Joanna Bumpers, while Mamie Young was the daughter of Green and Eliza Young of Chester County, South Carolina. Eugene and Mamie migrated to and married in Roanoke on October 22, 1916. During the first years of their marriage, the young family moved between Roanoke and Greensboro. Eugene worked as a stationary fireman and later as a laborer at the furnaces before the family eventually settled in Roanoke.
It was here that they suffered a terrible loss.
On September 15, 1923, little Luvenia somehow came to swallow extremely hot water. Her death certificate recounts that she developed traumatic tracheitis from swallowing the hot water. She survived for two days before dying at 8 p.m. on September 17, 1923.
She was just three years old.
Luvenia was buried two days later, and her death certificate records her place of burial as First Baptist Cemetery, the most clearly delineated section within what has come to be known as Old Lick Cemetery today.
Her family marked her resting place not with the sort of commercially produced monument that was marketed to survive conspicuously for generations, but with a small, homemade concrete curbed enclosure. At its head, they took a moment to scratch the little girl's name into the wet concrete, and still present within the space was the iron stake and remnants of the broken metal funeral marker placed by W F Hughes, corroded away after so much time in the earth.
More than a century later, that enclosure had broken apart and almost entirely disappeared beneath the earth. But the discovery of Luvenia's grave did something else: the research led us to another child, a sibling.
As we began researching Eugene and Mamie's family, we discovered that tragedy had already visited them several years before Luvenia's death.
A daughter named Maurice, one of the first set of twins was born prematurely in Roanoke and died on Jul 30, 1917 at only one month old. Her death was attributed to malnutrition associated with her prematurity...
And Maurice, too, was buried here at Old Lick Cemetery, and according to the only records we have at our disposal, notably *not* within the First Baptist section.
Her burial location, however, has not yet been identified.
The discovery of Luvenia's grave therefore gave us more than simply a marked gravesite in what appeared to be an unmarked area, still more than simply the actual location of a previously suspected interment with confirmation of its presence today - it led us to the fact that somewhere else within this cemetery is another daughter of Eugene and Mamie—an infant whose existence and interment here was previously unknown to us, a burial that may today be unmarked, may have been removed to Conyers Spring or perhaps, like her sister's, may still be concealed beneath the soil waiting to be recovered.
The years that followed Luvenia's death brought further challenges for the family. Eugene eventually declared bankruptcy, and he and Mamie separated. Their 1929 divorce proceedings record Eugene as no longer residing in Virginia. Some of their children followed him north to New York, while many would later return to Virginia, with members of the family continuing to live—and eventually being buried—in Roanoke well into more recent decades.
Mamie remarried James W Toney from Franklin County, Virginia and lived until 1975, when she died in Washington, D.C. Eugene ultimately settled farther north and died in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1963.
But we now know the little girl they buried here in September 1923 remained in Gainsboro.
For more than a century, the pieces of Luvenia's grave slowly disappeared beneath the grass. There was no standing headstone to announce who rested there—only a subtle feature in the ground, an indication on a GPR screen, and several sections of homemade concrete slipped beneath the surface.
One of those pieces still carried just enough of a name:
"Luvenia Bum..."
And because we found Luvenia, we now know to keep looking for Maurice.
