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
free dixie,sw
There were commemorative postage stamps for each group issued in the mid-1950s on the occasion of the last national "encampment" or meeting of each. The Confederates held their last one year after the last GAR encampment.
Also, I remember reading in Time Magazine in the early 1960s of the deaths of the last two veterans, one from each side. The last Union soldier to die was a retired coal miner from what had come to be known as West Virginia. The last soldier to die was a Texas rancher, a former Confederate drummer boy, who died one year after the coal miner. IIRC, the Texas rancher fell off his horse while riding the perimeter of his ranch at the age of 110 in 1961.
There is a stone in Mystic, Iowa's Highland Cemetery that gives name, birth and death as well as the phrase: Been here and gone. Had a good time."
That's a great story! Interesting read, and it shows what can happen when you don't give up. Persistence pays off every time.
I live in Harvard, MA, and we have the grave of a British soldier who died in the 1700's of smallpox. They went as far west as they could into the boondocks to bury him, which is what Harvard was at that time. Nowheresville. The grave is on Poor Farm Road, neatly kept up by the local historical society. We're also the site of an early Shaker settlement and so have a very old Shaker cemetery. I was walking one of my dogs in there one afternoon, and he suddenly took off, over the stone wall, leaped into the car through the open window, dragging me with him. He was terrified. I've always thought one of the elder ghosts told him to get out! I've taken him back from time to time, but he's never comfortable there. Other cemeteries, he seems okay.
I just hate seeing family cemeteries here in NC that are untended & forgotten.
Not too long ago, a relative called me about a cemetery that was "discovered" by a Girl Scout troop camping near a local lake.
Some of my ancestors are buried there and none of us knew where the cemetery was.
The Girl Scouts have decided to clean it up as a community service project.
A few of my relatives & I are planning to donate $ to their troop when they get working on it.
That was really nice of them.
Several of my ancestors are under the tarmac at Dobbins AFB in Marietta, Ga. They tried to locate as many as possible, but my grandma told me there were several they didn't find.
Oh well, at least they're not alone, there's many Union and Confederate soldiers buried under the tarmac with them.
There's all kinds of older cemeteries around here. One located in Villa Rica, about 35 miles west of Atlanta, has toombs from the late 1780's, the earliest found this far up in "Injun country".
he had been a private in the 9th TX Cavalry, from 1862 to the BITTER END.
free dixie,sw
i also know of one in McKinney, TX which reads:
I AM WHAT YOU WILL BE.
i assume DEAD is what was meant.
also, i have stood at the grave site of John Emerson Longly, late of 2d TX Infantry,CSA, at a private burial spot in TX. he is buried INSIDE a LIVING (hollow) TREE, standing up and facing SOUTH!
free dixie,sw
and one more epitath=====>
Here is the last resting place of Les Moore
Shot 2 times in the head with a Colt's .44
Now there's NO Les, NO Moore.
<=====that one was obviously not put up by a friend!
free dixie,sw
The Illinois Basin includes all the coals in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri and western Kentucky. The phrase was in the obits of virtually anyone who had been in the coal biz.
(PLEASE, don't tell mama i'm in the AWL BIZNESS. she thinks i play piano in a bawdy-house in east Dallas.)
LOL.
free dixie NOW,sw
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