Posted on 10/11/2004 6:36:53 AM PDT by Constitution Day
Forgotten Tennessee cemetery yields N.C. Confederate graves
By DUNCAN MANSFIELD, Associated Press Writer
October 9, 2004 11:35 am
JACKSBORO, Tenn. -- On a little hill overlooking the Cumberland Mountains, weeds and brush are being cleared from a neglected family cemetery, revealing a tall sentry-like beech tree and a forgotten past.
"Boothill" and 52 slash marks are carved deep in the trunk -- one cut for each of the sunken graves surrounding it. Some are marked by jagged field stones, others not. Who is entombed here?
"I was afraid that during my lifetime I would never know," said 88-year-old Alice Coker, a retired public health worker who has been tracking the mystery for half a century.
Descendants have recently provided the answer. These were Civil War soldiers, members of the 58th Confederate Regiment of North Carolina from just over the Great Smoky Mountains in Wautauga and surrounding counties.
Most were farmers, ages 19 to 44. They died months after enlisting not from combat but from "brain fever," measles and other diseases while encamped here during the harsh winter of 1862-63.
In the 1940s, Bob Delap, a member of the family who owned the small Delap Cemetery next to these neglected graves, told Coker that he was told as a boy they were Civil War soldiers. But Delap, who maintained the cemetery and the story, died in 1953.
With him, the story was lost and the cemetery fell into neglect, despite the burial of two Vietnam veterans there as late as 1988.
"I am not (a Civil War buff), but I am a curious person," Coker said. "But I couldn't find any local people who knew anything about it. It bothered me all these years."
That changed in late 2002 when Leta Cornett and her husband, Blaine, from Vilas, N.C., walked into the Campbell County Historical Society.
Cornett had been searching for the final resting place for her great-great-grandfather, Pvt. Dudley Glenn, for 15 years. All available records pointed to LaFollette, which was Big Creek Gap in 1862, and nearby Jacksboro.
She told the woman staffing the society office she was looking for Confederate kin in a Civil War cemetery. Maybe it was because this was pro-Union territory during the war or simply so long ago, but the woman told Leta she was wrong.
"She just didn't much like the idea that I insisted. To be quite honest, she was a little rude," Cornett said, laughing. Then the woman remembered Coker.
"So she called her and I heard her go, 'Uh-huhhh, uh-huhhh.' And I looked at my husband and said, 'She found it!'" Cornett said.
The Blaines drove immediately to Coker's house. Coker threw open the door in welcome and then they went to the cemetery.
"It was grown up. It was hard to get through the briars," Cornett recalled. But she was happy. "Ecstatic. I just can't hardly comprehend it," she said.
Since then, Glennis Monday, the environmental officer for the Campbell County sheriff's office, has been regularly leading teams of prisoners up the hill to clean up the cemetery.
They've hauled away 80 truckloads of brush and burned probably 80 more from an area just under an acre. "When I first came up here, I couldn't find it," Monday said. "You wouldn't have been able to turn in any direction without hitting a tree."
It's a far cry from manicured yet, but the cemetery's past is now coming into view. The beech tree strikingly stands guard over the sunken plots.
The society hopes in the next several months to create a nonprofit foundation to hold title to the property and raise money for a fenced and gated enclosure, its own entrance road and maintenance.
As many as 57 soldiers were buried here, according to Cornett's records. And the society intends to install a grave marker for each one.
"I think these men should be recognized," Coker said. "They were soldiers and died during the war. I think they deserve at least to be recognized and have it known where they are buried." URL for this article: http://www.heraldsun.com/state/6-531105.html
Where I grew up in western Massachusetts had some very old cemeteries. Is school, we did the crayon rubbings and all.
The thing I remember most though of the old town cemetery was seeing the new kid who worked for a friends landscaping company running like Forest Gump down Main Street.
Apparently while weedwacking around a tombstone in the old part, the ground gave way and he sunk in up to his waist. They told me he jumped clean out and just started running.
The kid never came back, not even to get his lunch or later to get his paycheck.
Yeah, it's the same in my old hometown, too.
(who'll bury the last one left?)
There was a small, landlocked cemetery near the south end of Prior Lake, MN that I have walked through several times. I recall seeing the grave of a young Minnesota man who fell in the first world war when he was just 18 or 19 years old.
No wonder Gore lost Tn! Should have found these voters.
I visited the old city cemetery in Lexington, KY a while back, mostly to see the beautiful landscape gardening. They had a brochure telling the story of its founding.
Apparently, there was smallpox epidemic that swept the settlement in the late 1700s. The townsfolk were overwhelmed with the large number of deaths, so they created a municipal cemetery to speedily inter the victims. An interesting vignette of the tragedy was that the local town drunk and ne'er-do-well, who had been shunned and ridiculed for years, was the only person willing to take the responsibility of personally burying all of the deceased. The townspeople were so grateful that he became a local hero, such that, after he died years later, they created a very pretty special plot and headstone in his honor.
The brochure also stated that municipal cemeteries became popular due to the fact that, as private land changed hands more often, the practice of having family cemeteries became impractical, what with the need for allocating land for this purpose and the need to attend to the graves regularly.
Its amazing what you learn on idle afternoons spent in visiting innocuous places during a vacation.
There is a old church cemetery in Hillsborough, NC where my (6x?) great-grandmother is buried.
She died during the Revolution and has the oldest tombstone in the cemetery. I've been there a couple of times and it's an amazing experience.
You may still be able to access your family tree online.
Ancestry.com (pay site) mirrors uploaded family tree information for free on http://www.rootsweb.com.
Just go to rootsweb and search on one of your ancestor's names.
d-i-x-i-e-b-u-m-p
My mothers family has an old cemetary in the mountains of W.VA. it is so much fun to look at mostly relatives headstones from before the civil war. You can almost follow the history of the family by where the head stones are.
A lot of paths lead to old cemetaries, lots of questions to be answered there as well. I have found a wealth of information that way.
Thanks,
I'll give it a try.
mc
I've been working on my family genealogy for many years and find it quite enjoyable. It's a lot like detective work and cemeteries are a usual source of information. Unfortunately, a tombstone makes a poor statement of a persons lifetime and it pains me to think that all the thoughts and experiences of my ancestors are all but forgotten. The journal that I started a few years ago will hopefully solve that for my descendents.
Old cemetaries are the mile posts to the past..
bump
Does that mean I only owe half if we have to pay reparations?
I do that, too. I "did" a cemetery at a local Methodist church just a couple of weeks ago, while I was waiting for an appointment with the pastor.
At another Methodist cemetery I visited last summer, there was a monument to a former pastor who had "Prayed for an earthquake during revival on (date) ... and it was answered!"
Re.:
"(who'll bury the last one left?)"
Better get on with it, then; it won't do to be the last survivor.
You'd just have to lie there and rot, I suppose.
But then; who'd notice?
my favorite is in the Greenhill, Tx cemetery:
"Mama loved Pa. Pa loved the women. Mama caught him with two in a-swimming. Here lies Pa."
free dixie,sw
We don't get many CVA graves in northwestern Illinois but there are certainly a good number of GAR graves marked by a GAR metal plate on a metal stick.
In the town graveyard in our miniscule rural town of 300 living folks, we have about eight to ten GAR graves, mostly without much further detail but one is of a 21-year-old whose gravestone indicates that he fell at Shiloh. There is also a monument in the center of the adjacent metropolis of a thousand living folks which carries the names of either those who served or those who served and were killed in the Civil War. There are dozens of names. Most local roads are named after the family names of those soldiers.
I have seen the graveyard at the North Church in Boston where, Jonathan Davenport's gravestone is prominent. He was pastor there late in his life. Earlier, he was the founder of New Haven in the vicinity of which I spent most of my life.
I am more emotionally engaged by any grave of anyone, however personally unknown to us today, who fell in either nation's military in the War Between the States than I would be by the many well-known non-Civil War worthies buried in the Northeast or elsewhere.
One exception: George Armstrong Custer. Though a distinguished cavalry officer of the Union, his fate at Little Big Horn was a sort of Lifetime Achievement Award and well-deserved.
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