This vignette is a part of Mirror Indy’s reporting on Greenlawn Cemetery. Read more here.

Cheney Lively is considered one of the city’s first African American residents, and during her lifetime became a wealthy woman and a landowner.

According to a profile of her compiled by historian Kate Scott, Lively was the only Black woman listed as head of a household in Indianapolis in 1830. 

Born enslaved in Kentucky in the 1790s, Lively came to Indianapolis in 1822 with Alexander Ralston, the white man who would go on to plat Mile Square. Much remains unknown about their relationship, though it’s clear that she served him at least as a housekeeper. Slavery was outlawed in the state’s 1816 constitution, but it was socially tolerated. Scott notes the question of slavery “looms over their intertwined histories.”

Lively at one point purchased a plot at the corner of Maryland and Meridian streets, according to Scott’s account. In 1836, she married John G. Britton, a barber, Mason and prominent member of the Second Baptist Church.

Lively was stepmother to her husband’s daughter, Eliza Britton Gibbs, whose descendants flourished in Indianapolis for decades.

Lively died in the late 1850s, prior to the opening of Crown Hill Cemetery, which means she may have been buried in Greenlawn Cemetery, according to local historian Leon Bates.

Lively is one of many African Americans whose lives and deaths are being researched in light of the impending developments that have already disturbed human remains at the site of the city’s first public cemetery, including a segregated section where the city’s earliest African American residents were buried.

With no plans for a formal excavation, those who are buried at Greenlawn and are not found during construction will likely be buried forever.

Reach Mirror Indy reporter Emily Hopkins at 317-790-5268 or emily.hopkins@mirrorindy.org. Follow them on most social media @indyemapolis.