cornelius community garden

The Cornelius Community Garden was founded in 2013 on the land where the Caldwell family once enjoyed gardening.  The land is now leased by the Town of Cornelius to the SCC. The water is provided by the town.

HISTORY

For Lisa Mayhew-Jones, building the Cornelius Community Garden is more than a community project, it’s a chance to relive childhood memories and honor her family from Smithville. 

“We would play outside all day and never had to go inside because we had the garden. It was just awesome,” Mayhew-Jones reminisced. Mayhew-Jones, Project Manager – Residential Services of the Smithville Community Coalition, along with members of the board of directors Sammie Knox and Ron Potts, spearheaded the project to bring a community garden to the site where her grandparents’ house once sat.  

After Mayhew-Jones’ grandmother, Josephine Caldwell, passed away, the family decided to sell the property. The buyer of the property was the Town of Cornelius, who eventually gave the land to the Smithville Community Coalition to build a community garden. 

The coalition had plans to build a community garden for quite some time, but when the Cornelius Parks & Recreation department went to check out the originally proposed property, it was deemed unfit because of how the sun would hit the site. That’s when Mayhew-Jones and the coalition approached the town to find a place that would make a good site for the Cornelius Community Garden.  

One of the goals of the Smithville Community Coalition and the garden is to preserve the Smithville Community. According to Mayhew-Jones, “Nothing better could have come out of (the property), and my grandparents would be proud, because they always had a garden here. And they’d be proud to know that we are using the property to make Smithville a community garden.”