Dear Memphians,
If you’ve ever driven past the cemetery at Central Avenue and Lafayette Street and thought, “I wonder what that’s about,” read on:
If you drive west on Central Avenue towards the Memphis Pink Palace Museum, you may notice a small cemetery at the corner of Central and Lafayette Street immediately before you see the museum’s fence. This graveyard was in use well before Clarence Saunders bought the land for his palace.
In the 1870s, this area was outside of the city limits of Memphis and known as the Ridgehigh section of Buntyn’s Station, a railroad stop on the Memphis and Charleston Railroad. Buntyn’s Station was a large area of land that stretched east to west from Highland Street to Buntyn Street and north to south from Central Avenue to Park Avenue. Farmers who settled near Central Avenue and Buntyn Street began to call the area Ridgehigh. Buntyn’s Station was a town in its own right, and Ridgehigh was the town’s farthest settlement. The center of this neighborhood became Ridgehigh Baptist Church at…
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Caroline Mitchell Carrico 
Why are your favorite artifacts Cold War Civil Defense Supplies?
The whole period from the end of WWII to the Berlin Wall coming down has always been fascinating to me. I’m intrigued by the international relations of the period, but I’m more interested in domestic reactions to the nuclear arms race. The Civil Defense Supplies provide an unintended time capsule of the period and provide a glimpse at the zeitgeist that just reading about the time doesn’t capture.