Baxter-Patrick James Island Library

The Evergreen (Grimball) Cemetery is located behind the new Baxter-Patrick County Library on James Island. The Library was completed in November 2019. The cemetery, previously known as Grimball Cemetery, dates to as early as 1906. During the 1960s, the name changed to Evergreen and was an active cemetery until April 2003.

The Baxter-Patrick Cemetery Project can trace its roots back to another James Island cemetery project. Charlotte Smith and Lish Thompson, members of the CCPL staff working in the South Carolina Room, documented the 63 burials of McLeod Plantation Cemetery in Fall 2016 for their cultural history interpreter, Shawn Halifax. That project initially began with the library's program in June 2016 about the Charleston County Parks and Recreation's extensive renovation of the McLeod Plantation's house and grounds. The project completed in December 2016 and in January 2017, Thompson learned that there was an undocumented cemetery on the new James Island Library site, which was the old Baxter-Patrick School site. This became the basis for the Baxter-Patrick Cemetery Project.

The main objective of this project was to fully document the individuals buried in the Evergreen Cemetery. Charlotte Smith and Lish Thompson, members of the CCPL staff, working in the South Carolina Room at the main branch of the library, researched death and funeral notices in the Charleston Evening Post, News and Courier, and the Post and Courier. They also searched for death certificates and Social Security Death Index information from Ancestry.com. They took pictures and gathered information on each marked burial site, visiting the cemetery thirteen times over nearly a six month period. They took more than 850 photographs, transcribed marker inscriptions, and identified 261 marked burials. They indexed Eugene Frasier's two books, James Island Stories from Slave Descendants and A History of James Island Descendants and Plantation Owners to help identify potential burials in the cemetery. During their research, Smith and Thompson found an additional 51 unmarked burials and 32 potential burials.