Green Lawn Cemetery
Preservation, restoration, veteran remembrance, family-history research, and public understanding of a site central to Chester’s Black history.
History, preservation, remembrance, and care
Community work across Chester.
These initiatives carry the YES Center’s commitment into places and stories throughout the city—preserving memory, recognizing leadership, caring for historic sites, and creating ways for people to encounter Chester’s past.
Women Change Makers · YES Center photo gallery
Public history belongs in public life
Honor the people, places, and stories that shape Chester.
The initiative work grows from the same values as the center itself: education, cultural awareness, justice, dignity, community participation, and the belief that local history should remain visible and useful.
The YES Center’s initiatives connect public history with preservation, education, remembrance, and community care across Chester.
A working public-history portfolio
Six ways to keep Chester visible.
Place · remembrance
Chester’s Women Change Makers
Documenting and recognizing women whose leadership, labor, care, creativity, and advocacy shaped the city and its communities.
Open the archiveChester Black History Tour
Connecting residents and visitors with historic sites, institutions, neighborhoods, and stories through place-based learning.
Take the tourSanctuary Garden
A community-centered vision for reflection, beauty, remembrance, and shared care.
Specialty exhibits
Bringing Chester history into civic and community spaces through focused displays, interpretation, and conversation.
Justice & remembrance
Keeping stories such as Alexander McClay Williams’ life and exoneration present in public memory.
Collect · research · share · care
Preservation becomes stronger when people can participate.
Each initiative creates a different doorway: a cemetery record, a name on a wall, a neighborhood site, a garden, an exhibition, or a story of injustice and repair.
Together they can support research, public programs, volunteer work, family connections, and material for the future Chester Museum—while remaining distinct projects with their own needs and stewardship requirements.
See how this work connects to the museumA landscape of family and public memory
Preserve the site. Reconnect the stories.
Green Lawn work includes preservation, veteran remembrance, family-history research, and broader understanding of the cemetery’s importance to Chester’s Black history.
Cemetery records require careful accuracy, privacy, correction, stewardship, and publication practices before any public search experience.
Connect about Green Lawn
The city’s knowledge is distributed
The work grows through relationships.
Residents, descendants, historians, educators, artists, veterans, faith communities, civic partners, and the Chester diaspora all hold pieces of the record. The YES Center can help those pieces meet without claiming that one institution owns the whole story.
Ways to contributeBring knowledge, time, and connection
Help keep Chester’s stories in view.
Share a family connection, volunteer skill, research lead, historic item, partnership idea, or question about an initiative.
Connect about an initiative