How You Can Help
We are asking for your help to ensure the name of our Burke community remains. Please click below to sign the petition.
Why Saving Burke is Important
A campaign to rename Burke has been mounted by a neighbor who chose Burke as their home recently, we would like to respond with our names and our stories. The families that have come together to build this site and respond to the renaming effort have roots that go back for many generations. Burke, for us, means home.
Burke is home to centuries of family stories and memories. It is the location where real people lived out their dreams and hopes, recorded their family births and deaths, helped neighbors, and rallied for important causes. It is the place where people built businesses, and engaged in the fullness of life - the beautiful and the challenging.
Burke isn’t one person.
It isn’t a memorial to one story or one family, but to many.
On this site we invite you to hear a bit of our perspective, consider some additional history, and sign a petition if you find yourself in support. Burke was never named to memorialize Silas Burke. He was a landowner who gave the right-of-way for the train station that identified this area as Burke's Station. More than that, like many names, what was originally locational or directional - became contextual. The context for us, is home. Burke is a place where thousands upon thousands of people made family history.
The history shared on this site is not intended to justify or apologize for any faults of Silas Burke. He was a slave owner and an attorney who represented many people, some of whom owned slaves. He served as executor for many peoples’ estates, again some who owned slaves. His story is real. Rather, than change or justify it, we want to share more information in order to tell a fuller story of the formation of this community.
Thanks for stopping by and we ask you to share some of your life stories in Burke with us.
