As one of Mecklenburg County's early family graveyards, the Polk Family Cemetery holds special importance in the area's history. It is the resting place of James K. Polk's grandmother, Maria Polk, and several other relatives who died before his birth, and it also includes several graves of the Alexander family, another well-known Mecklenburg County family. Over time, the cemetery suffered neglect, vandalism, and exposure to natural elements. In 1988, the proposed Outer Loop of Interstate-485 threatened to bisect it, and the North Carolina Department of Transportation and Department of Natural and Cultural Resources moved it from its original location off of Old Nations Ford Road in Pineville to the President James K. Polk State Historic Site. The cemetery is also connected to the Bigham workshop: during the 1760s, Samuel Bigham Sr., an immigrant from Northern Ireland who had lived in Pennsylvania before moving to North Carolina in 1763, began operating one of North Carolina's earliest and best-known stonecutting workshops in the Steele Creek section of Mecklenburg County. For two generations, the Bigham family provided quality headstones for much of the Catawba Valley and parts of South Carolina, and the headstones of Maria Polk and Samuel and Margaret McClery may have been carved by Bigham.