Mount Hope Cemetery, a 34.3-acre cemetery owned by the City of Raleigh, was established about 1872 for African Americans and has continued to be operated almost exclusively for them. Soon after the Civil War, the old City Cemetery was filled with interments, and the City of Raleigh appointed three prominent African American citizens, "Messrs. Lougee, [Norfleet] Dunston, and Praire," to locate and purchase land for a new cemetery. In early 1872, the city purchased eleven and one-half acres south of Raleigh, near Tucker's Mill on the Fayetteville road, from Joseph H. and Nicholas B. Barham. The original cemetery contains a gracefully picturesque garden design of driveways dividing the grounds into large curvilinear sections laid out into family plots, with undulating hills landscaped in grassy lawns and a variety of deciduous and evergreen trees. Approximately 1,500 monuments honor Raleigh's Black citizens, including men and women who rose out of slavery to become prominent in church leadership, education at Raleigh's two early African American colleges, St. Augustine's and Shaw, as well as in the public schools, medicine, business, politics, and civic service. Mount Hope Cemetery has stood as a landmark of African American pride in Raleigh from the early days of freedom in the 1870s to the Civil Rights era of the 1950s.