Jubilee Memorial Gardens

In 2008, associate professor in architecture Katherine Ambroziak and local organization Knoxville ReAnimation Coalition (KRC) partnered up for the Odd Fellows Cemetery Reclamation Project, which aims to reclaim the grounds through rehabilitation of the landscape and reintegration into the surrounding community.Located in East Knoxville and dating back to the 1880s, Odd Fellows Cemetery was established by African-American fraternal and sororal organizations. After the organizations' disbandings in the 1930s, the cemetery has since been overrun with vegetation, and over 90 percent of the estimated 6,000 burial markers have been lost.“Odd Fellows Cemetery is between Vine Jr. High School, where I went to school in the early 1960s, and my home in East Knoxville, where I grew up walking past it on my way home from school,” Stephen Scruggs, co-founder and former co-president of KRC, said. “After retiring from Los Angeles and relocating to Knoxville I targeted the cemetery as a project to improve the community because of its deteriorating condition.”KRC and Ambroziak planned to improve the public’s perception of the cemetery and create a sense of invitation and community pride by improving accessibility to the landscape through maintenance and supporting the contemporary commemoration of the grounds through social and spiritual ties.For example, Ambroziak and KRC worked together on designing a “community passage,” a pathway running through Odd Fellows Cemetery that they believe would it more accessible and easier to walk through. While they intend to make a more permanent community passage, researchers and volunteers have helped build a temporary pathway out of earthen berms.While the KRC chose the Odd Fellows Cemetery as the center of the project, Ambroziak serves as the primary designer and coordinator of the program, the architect focusing on spatial and contemporary memorial theories of architecture.“Katherine Ambroziak and UTK has been a common denominator from our beginning in 2008, and her vision of our potential was an... (UT Daily Beacon)