Greenwood Cemetery, established in 1882 on the grounds of an earlier cemetery, is New Bern’s second-oldest public cemetery and the first city-owned cemetery for African Americans. Thirteen grave markers are dated between 1816 and 1859. At least five men who served in the U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War are buried there, along with James Edward O’Hara, a prominent African American legislator of the postwar period. Born in New York City on February 26, 1844, to an Irish merchant father and a West Indian mother, O’Hara sailed between the city and the West Indies as a youth, settled in New Bern about 1862, and taught in freedman’s schools there and in Goldsboro after the war. He was elected from New Bern to the state legislature in 1868 while studying law, passed the bar examination in 1871, represented North Carolina’s Second District in the U.S. Congress from 1883 to 1887, and served as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1884. In Congress he served on the House Committees for Pensions, Mines and Mining, and Expenditures on Public Buildings, spoke against racial violence, introduced one of the first bills to make lynching a federal crime, and unsuccessfully sought equal accommodations for all travelers in an interstate commerce bill. After losing reelection in 1886, he practiced law in New Bern with his son Raphael and published the Enfield Progress. He died on September 15, 1905, and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery. Those buried there from the U.S. Colored Troops include Thomas Fisher of Company C, 38th USCT, which fought in Virginia in 1864 and occupied Richmond in 1865; Payton White of Battery A and Cornelius W. Jones of Battery B, 14th U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery, which was organized nearby; Jonas McDonald of Battery B, 2nd U.S. Colored Light Artillery, which served in Virginia and Texas from 1864 to 1866; and William A. Wood of the 20th USCT, which served in Louisiana and Texas between 1864 and 1866.