As the Wescott Cemetery in Manteo relocates, a family fights for its legacy

By Kip Tabb | Outer Banks Voice on August 15, 2026

The Westcott Cemetery looking toward the Dare County Regional Airport terminal. (Credit: Kip Tabb)

By Kip Tabb | Outer Banks Voice

There is a low white picket fence surrounding a cemetery at the Dare County Regional Airport. Outside the fence sits the airport’s tarmac, with planes parked waiting for their next destination.

The grass inside the fence is brown and dry, the ground spongy to walk on. The few gravestones inside the fence are laid flat and seem to be randomly distributed.

To the Dare County Airport Authority, it is the Brisbane Cemetery, named for a man “who owned [the property] for a short time,” according to Juanita Wescott. But to Wescott and her family, that area is the Wescott Cemetery and part of a treasured family inheritance.

According Wescott, the land the cemetery rests on was owned by either the Wescotts or their direct ancestors until well into the 20^th Century and has been the final resting place for generations of her family.

As the Airport Authority moves forward with plans to pave over the cemetery, Wescott describes what has happened since she learned of the county’s plans for the cemetery in 2023 as “three years of nightmare experience.”

For his part, Dare County Regional Airport Director Stacy Ambrose described the cemetery as, “if you take the Walmart parking lot and have a little 60 by 60 square in the middle of the parking lot. We’ve got an apron out here for aircraft parking, and this cemetery is right the middle of the apron.”

The cemetery’s relocation, Ambrose said, “is really a safety thing.” A jet taxiing at night “could crash through this little white picket fence and get stuck in the grass.”

“I don’t care about their tires,” Wescott asserts. “I care about my graveyard. Has anybody ever hit it? I say, well, if a pilot hits it, they don’t need to be a pilot.”

The graves will be moved. Plans call for the bodies to be exhumed in October and moved to the Manteo Cemetery where Wescott has acquired property for the graves.

Originally, she had asked the airport to simply pave over the site and create a memorial with the names of the people buried there. But she was told that “there’s a law, and I’m sure that they’re having to follow the law.”

The ground scan of the Wescott Cemetery revealing “soil disturbance indicative of burial.” (Image provided by Juanita Westcott)

There is agreement that the bodies have to be moved, but no one knows how many bodies are within the picket fence. A ground scan of the of cemetery found what have been described as anomalies, “soil disturbance indicative of burial,” according to the Historical and Archeological investigation of the cemetery. The scan did identify eight headstones and but only five headstones can be read.

If there is a culprit for the confusion over exactly who is buried in the cemetery and how many bodies are there, it is the US Government which built the airport. Commissioned on March 3, 1943, the airfield was used by the Navy and Coast Guard for anti-submarine patrols, and the base as a training base for naval aircraft— F4F Wildcats, F6F Hellcats, TBF Avengers and F4U Corsairs. The federal government signed the airport over to Dare County in 1947.

During construction, anything that was in the way was torn up and thrown away, including the headstones in the Wescott Cemetery. “They had actually thrown the stones away at the dump,” Wescott said, adding that family members asked to have them restored. “So what they put back was the five” that are readable, she noted.

The earliest burials at the cemetery, Wescott believes, were for Thomas and Miriam Midyett at the end of the 18th century. Thomas Midyett left some of his property to his daughter Barbara who married John “Jackie” Wescott. The couple lived as common-law husband and wife for a number of years but married legally in 1824.

The most prominent Wescott buried at the airport, according to Juanita, is John Wellington Wescott who in 1870 gave Dare County “an acre of property for a courthouse” that helped establish the county.

The airport plans for that cemetery site call for a memorial stone to be placed where the cemetery is located with 13 names on it.

Wescott is also planning a memorial plaque at the Manteo Cemetery where the bodies will be placed. She noted that “when it’s all said and done, we want our inheritance back.”

A 2017 family reunion at the Wescott Cemetery. (Juanita Wescott)

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