Photograph of Naomi Hester, Annual African American Heritage Celebration at Cartwright Park on 5-17-1992. Manteo, North Carolina.

Cartwright Park is located where the first AME Zion church used to sit, on the corner of Sr. Walter Raleigh Street and Bideford Street.
This church was the first African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Northeastern North Carolina. Andrew Cartwright, the founder of the Manteo AME Zion Church was born in Elizabeth City in 1835.

Some contend that he was the son of enslaved parents and other believe that he was freeborn.
He became an ordained minister of the AME Zion Church sometime around 1860 in New England.
Cartwright Park includes the ruins of the church, as well as a pavilion, where the Annual African American Heritage Celebration was held in 1992 when this photograph was taken.

Shortly after, during the federal occupation of Eastern North Carolina, Andrew Cartwright returned to North Carolina and began preaching to freedmen in the areas around the Albemarle Sound.
He settled in Manteo in 1865, where he established an AME Zion Church. Cartwright went on to establish churches in Pasquotank, Perquimans, Currituck, Camden, and Hertford counties, and later in his life, he even became one of the first missionaries in Liberia.

Source: Outer Banks History Center, North Carolina
AV.5137.2318 - Naomi Hester, Annual African American Heritage Celebration, Manteo, 5-17-1992 - Drew Wilson Photographs, OBHC.