DeWitty Cemetery lies about ten miles west of Brownlee, in Section 27 of Township 28, Range 30, on land now part of the Hanna ranch. It is the burial ground of DeWitty — later renamed Audacious — which was the largest and longest-lasting African American rural settlement in Nebraska.
The settlement began in 1907, after Clem Deaver, the first African American to file a Kinkaid homestead claim in Cherry County, found some fifty thousand acres still unclaimed and set about promoting it. The Kinkaid Act of 1904 offered 640-acre homesteads, and families came — among them former slaves who had fled to Canada before the Civil War, and their children and grandchildren returning south to claim land of their own. The settlement's holdings eventually bordered the North Loup River for nearly fifteen miles. Twenty-four families held fourteen thousand acres by 1910; by 1917 there were around a hundred families, and by 1920 some 185 people held forty thousand acres.
It was a full community, not a camp. An African Methodist Episcopal church was organised in 1910 by the Reverend O. J. Burckhardt. There was a post office, a general store, a barber, three rural school districts, and a baseball team called the North Loup Sluggers. The annual August picnic drew people over from Brownlee.
Drought and crop failures after the First World War brought foreclosures, and the sandhills proved too dry for the farming the homesteads depended on. The last African American resident sold out in 1936. The last parcel still held by a settler's descendants was sold in 1993.
Little is left to see. There are no markers and no fence any more, though the outlines of a few graves are still visible, and the sod church stood just to the north-west of the burial ground. Much of what is known about who lies here was remembered by Nellie Ruh Cherry Emanuel, born in 1907 and the last surviving of the thirteen children of Joshua and Mary Emanuel, and passed on by her granddaughter.
Names recorded here include Joshua “Doss” Emanuel; Jemima Scott Brown, wife of George Brown; an infant of Maurice and Gertie Meehan Brown; Ralph Meehan, who was born and died in 1908; Nellie Price, wife of Turner Price, who died in 1922; Hazel Crawford; Ruthie Masterson; Lewis Thomas; Thomas Hansen; and Nora Steel. Not all burials were in the cemetery proper — Jemima Brown was buried about half a mile north-west of the present river bridge, and a woman remembered only as Grandma Curtis about half a mile south of the river.
There is also a single grave a short way to the south and east, on what was Joshua Emanuel's own homestead. It is a child's grave, marked with the four posts of a bedstead. The foundation of the family's house is still standing nearby.
Older genealogical records and transcriptions index this cemetery under the period name “Colored Settlement Cemetery”; anyone searching those records will need that spelling. Around twelve memorials have been indexed online, which is a record of what has been documented rather than a count of everyone buried here — the true number is higher, and some of it is no longer recoverable.
This is working ranch land and there is nothing on the ground to mark the site, so ask locally before visiting. A Nebraska State Historical Society marker tells the settlement's story. For burial records or plot enquiries, contact the Cherry County Clerk in Valentine, and the Cherry County Historical Society in Valentine, which has worked to keep DeWitty's record. Ownership can also be confirmed through the Nebraska Statewide Cemetery Registry at the State Historical Society.