In 1948 Edmondson stopped sculpting. On February 7, 1951, at age seventy-six, he died quietly in his home in Nashville, Tennessee, where illness had confined him to bed for several months. As he was the last of his siblings to pass, his five nieces and seven nephews carried out his funeral service which was held the next day. Edmondson was buried in Mount Ararat Cemetery, now Greenwood Cemetery (Nashville, Tennessee), Nashville's oldest black cemetery. Today there is no sign of Edmondson's grave marker because at the time cheap wooden caskets were used to bury African Americans. As the wood decayed it would cause the grave markers to sink into the earth. Mt. Ararat burial records of the period were lost in a fire, so his exact grave site is unknown.