Photo by Karim Shamsi-Basha.
Julie Sellers Muir cleans up a headstone at the Bailey-Sellers cemetery.
Julie Sellers Muir was nine years old the first time her father sent her down to the family cemetery. She remembers the errand more than the reason for it — a small girl walking into a fenced patch of old stones tucked between commercial lots off Oxmoor Road.
Photos by Karim Shamsi-Basha.
The Bailey-Sellers cemetery sits off of Green Springs Highway.
“I remember wandering around between the graves and stones, and something happened that day,” Muir said. “Ever since, I can’t stop diving into the history of these grounds.”
Her father told her the story that day, the one that has stayed with her for decades. Family land, sold in the 1800s for a dollar. At least that’s what the legend says. A church built on it. The church eventually moved on. The cemetery stayed. The ground under it was never sold — it was donated, and it still belongs to the family.
“That’s the story I grew up with,” she said. “I didn’t understand what it meant then. I do now after years of studying and digging.”
What it means, it turns out, is a piece of Homewood’s origin story. The burying ground Muir has spent the last year reclaiming was the cemetery of the Oak Grove Cumberland Presbyterian Church — today known as the Bailey-Sellers Cemetery, for the two families whose dead fill most of it.
BEFORE THERE WAS A HOMEWOOD
The church began in 1883 in a brush arbor, when Birmingham itself was a twelve-year-old village and Shades Valley was farm country. Oak Grove was a dairying community — some thirty dairies scattered across the vicinity. There was no Green Springs Highway. People got to Birmingham by way of what is now Columbiana Road, or Scott Street.
On May 3, 1885, the congregation formally organized as a Cumberland Presbyterian church under the Alabama Presbytery. By the standard of continuous service, it is the oldest church in Homewood — older than the city it now sits in by more than forty years. Homewood incorporated in 1926. Oak Grove was annexed in 1955.
Photos by Karim Shamsi-Basha.
The land came from William and Amanda Sellers, early members and Muir’s kin, who gave the acre at the corner of Green Springs Highway and Oxmoor Road. Four different buildings rose on that property across eighty-four years. In 1892 the church housed the Zelosophian Academy, a private grade school run by James Hall, who also served as pastor. When the Cumberland Presbyterians and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) voted to unite in 1906, Oak Grove declined; the members who wanted the union left and founded Edgewood Presbyterian six years later.
A Birmingham News account from August 1958 catches the congregation at a hinge moment, preparing to hold its final services in the little white frame church before moving into a new sanctuary that September. The reporter noted how the acre had shrunk — Green Springs Highway had cut it to a fraction of its original size, leaving a triangle. The building that stood there in 1928 had burned; the members rebuilt.
Then Interstate 65 came through. In 1967 the highway forced the church off the land entirely, and the congregation relocated to Columbiana Road, where it remains. In 1979 the Birmingham Presbytery renamed it Homewood Cumberland Presbyterian Church. An addition was completed in 1983.
The church left. The graves did not.
HALLOWED GROUNDS
Photos by Karim Shamsi-Basha.
A headstone at the Bailey-Sellers cemetery.
Muir and her husband had long shared what she calls a hobby: cemetery history, the kind of interest that makes a person pull over for a roadside marker. Last year the hobby turned into an obligation.
“The cemetery needed me,” she said. “It’s overgrown and severely neglected.” She started clearing it in November, and she has been at it since.
The research came with the clearing. She worked Ancestry, then went deeper: the library, the genealogy collection at Samford, probate records downtown. An uncle who had spent years as the family’s unofficial historian shared what he had. Jake Collins, a Homewood schoolteacher and local historian, became another source.
Photos by Karim Shamsi-Basha.
Muir went through ancestry to unearth her family history.
Names began attaching themselves to stones. Her grandfather’s grandfather traces back to Martha Morris Sellers, who married Henderson Sellers. Henderson was killed in the Civil War. The Morris name survives on Morris Boulevard — where, in one of those loops that local history keeps making, Muir’s own mother once lived.
Last June, Ancestry gave her something that stopped her: Henderson’s brothers, lying in the cemetery in unmarked graves. They were in the civil war. One died. One came home without an arm. One came home without a finger.
Then the story reached across to her husband’s side. His great-grandmother was a Bailey — the other family in Bailey-Sellers. By Muir’s reckoning, she and her husband are fourth cousins four times removed.
“That made it mean so much more to me,” she said, “because my husband’s people are buried there, too.”
CONNECTING THE DOTS
Muir describes the work in a register that has nothing morbid in it.
“The cemetery is peaceful, and I get a great sense of calm there,” she said. “The history is fascinating. It’s a way of bringing people back to life.”
And it does not stop at the fence line. The families in Bailey-Sellers married into the families in Union Hill Cemetery, Massey Cemetery, Morris Cemetery. Trace one line and it runs through all of them. “All these families intermarried,” she said. “Homewood, before it was Homewood, was a small enough world that everyone is somebody’s cousin.”
The cleanup has reached the point Muir was aiming for: the site is safe enough now to bring in volunteers. She wants help, and she wants company.
She also has a sense of timing. Homewood is marking its hundredth year, and Muir sees the cemetery as exactly the sort of thing a centennial ought to notice: a place where a city can point students and neighbors and say, this is where we started. Local education. Local proof.
“This cemetery is a huge part of the history of Homewood,” she said. “It’s connecting the dots.”
Her father sent her there when she was nine. She has spent a lifetime seeking answers.
