Upon a Lonely Hill

Jeffrey L. Carrier

Description

On a warm July day in 1979, a sixteen-year-old named Jeffrey Carrier visited the old Donnelly Cemetery in Johnson County, Tennessee, a rural county in the northeast corner of the state. He was there for more than an hour, wandering from stone to stone, writing down every name, date and epitaph. It was the beginning of a project that took him six years to complete, and when it was done, he had visited 282 cemeteries in the county and recorded more than 10,000 names. The information was published in 1985 and has been aiding genealogists and historians ever since. The original edition was a limited printing, and most of those copies have fallen apart and are no longer extant. Except for another limited printing in 2012, the book has mostly been unavailable for use. This professionally-printed edition changes that, as the information is now available to everyone, everywhere who can trace their family roots back to Johnson County, Tennessee or who has an interest in cemeteries.

Sujets

• Histoire
• History
• Tennessee

Informations

• Publié par: AuthorHouse
• Date de parution: 29 mars 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798823004701
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Upon a Lonely Hill



The Cemeteries of Johnson County, Tennessee





Jeffrey L. Carrier






AuthorHouse™
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.authorhouse.com
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© 2023 Jeffrey L. Carrier. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 03/28/2023

ISBN: 979-8-8230-0469-5 (sc)
ISBN: 979-8-8230-0470-1 (e)






Cover design by Stephan Smith

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.



Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.



Contents
Preface
The Cemeteries









Jeffrey L. Carrier writing down information from tombstones in the Mountain View Cemetery, July 1984.



Preface
“Ouch!” I exclaimed, as I tried to extract myself from a thicket of hawthorns. I had been climbing up a steep hill when I lost my balance and fell backwards.
When I noticed the specks of blood where thorns had pierced the skin of my arm, I wanted to turn around and go back down the hill. I was not sure that visiting the cemetery at the top of the hill was worth the effort. It was still a considerable distance to the top, and it looked like an area of rough climbing was ahead. I was tempted to give up.
The date was October 29, 1979. It was late in the afternoon, an afternoon very warm for autumn, making it an ideal day for cemetery hunting, a hobby I had begun just a few months earlier. Actually, it was more than a hobby; It was a difficult project.
On July 2 of that year, I had spent more than an hour in the old Donnelly Cemetery on North Church Street, just beyond the city limits of Mountain City, Tennessee. In my hand was a stack of index cards and as I stopped at each grave stone, I wrote down the name, date and epitaph. Later at home, I alphabetized the cards, pulled my father’s old manual typewriter out of the closet and typed up the information. I was determined to make a record of every tombstone in every cemetery in the county. It was my father’s idea.
He was not only a preacher but also an amateur historian, and he had discovered how important old cemeteries are as records of people who were long gone. In 1975, when he was writing his master’s thesis about the history of Baptists in Upper East Tennessee, he spent a lot of time researching the early years of the Mountain City First Baptist Church, where he was pastor. It had been founded in 1794 and the first meeting house was on the north fork of Roan Creek at the foot of Rainbow Mountain. Dad found references in old records to a cemetery next to the church and he was determined to find it.
He finally located an elderly man who lived near the site of that first church building who remembered seeing tombstones.
“I’ll be glad to take you to the spot,” he told my father. “I haven’t been over there in a long time, but the stones are still standing and you can even read some of the names.”
It was on a Saturday morning when my father went looking for the old cemetery. He took me along and even though I was just a kid, I was well aware of my father’s excitement. He was especially hoping to find the grave of the church’s first pastor, James Tompkins.
The old man met us in front of his small house and led us on foot across the road and into a field. He used a cane made out of an old hickory limb, but maintained a steady pace as we traipsed through the tall weeds still damp with the morning dew. We passed a thick grove of trees and then he suddenly stopped. A large swath of the field had been scraped and scarred by the sharp blade of a bulldozer, which was still parked at the edge of the woods. The land was obviously being prepared for a house.
The stones were right over there,” the old man said, pointing his cane toward one edge of the bulldozed area. “I’m positive they were right there, two short rows of them.”
There was no sign of them, and my father’s disappointment weighed heavily on him. As we walked slowly back to the car, his head was bowed and he did not speak. “How could that happen?” he kept saying as we drove home. “How could someone destroy those graves?”
A few years later, in the summer of 1979, no doubt still smarting over the destruction of that ancient cemetery, he told me that the older grave yards in the county would one day disappear and if no one made a record of the names, that information would be lost forever.
“I think it would be a good thing for you to do,” he said. “Go to every cemetery you can find and write down everything... every name, every date and even the epitaphs. You will be making a valuable contribution to the history of this county. And this is the perfect time for you to do it, while you are young and have the time and energy.”
Perhaps my father was worried that I had reached an age where I might get into trouble and wanted to keep me occupied. I had just turned sixteen, and spending hours in cemeteries is not something teenagers like to do, but for some strange reason, the project did appeal to me.
Beginning on that summer day in 1979, I spent the next six years visiting the cemeteries and grave yards of Johnson County, Tennessee. And on a chilly day in March of 1985, when I finished gathering information from several graves in the Forge Creek area of the county, I had been to several hundred burial sites and recorded almost ten thousand names. A fascinating project had come to an end.
During the first couple of years, not many people knew what I was doing. I was a little embarrassed to talk about the hours I was spending among the departed. If someone asked about weekend plans, I’d offer some quip about working on a book. “It has numerous plots,” I’d say with a smile. “And everyone dies at the end!”
The first time I received any attention was in June of 1981 when a reporter from the Johnson City Press Chronicle named Paul Mays called me. He had heard that a teenager was making a record of cemeteries and was curious. “Is that true?” he asked. When I admitted that it was, he drove two hours to our house and interviewed me. I was thrilled! I didn’t ask how he had learned of my unusual pastime, but I suspect my father was responsible.
When the article appeared, the phone rang off the hook, with people asking when the information would be available and to let me know about old and forgotten cemeteries behind barns, on hilltops and in woodland clearings. So many gravestones would have been missed if not for those phone calls.
Perhaps feeling a little annoyed because I had not let her know first, Gladys McCloud, who wrote a column for our local paper, interviewed me for a feature article that appeared a month later.
“Jeff isn’t interested in becoming a grave digger,” Mrs. McCloud wrote, “but he does spend a lot of time in cemeteries. And he isn’t looking for ghosts. He’s making a census of the dead, which does sound like a morbid hobby.”
The older people in the community were very supportive, and I was even invited to become a member of the local historical society, but I did get a lot of kidding from friends my own age. “I always knew you were weird,” laughed one of my schoolmates, “but you are even weirder than I thought!”
I spent many hours among the tombstones. Some cemeteries were large and still in use, the grounds well-tended while others were small and forgotten, many at the head of hollers or in thick forests, the gravestones neglected and obscured by vines and weeds. I even discovered some graves that were all alone. I searched for those old cemeteries in all seasons, sometimes on hot days and occasionally on cold winter afternoons with flurries of snow in the air. I didn’t mind the cold and learned that rubbing a little snow in the grooves of the oldest stones made them easier to read.
I did prefer to do my cemetery hunting in the summer, when the weather was warm. 1981 was an especially busy summer for seeking out old cemeteries, and when I look over the records for that project, I see that I visited nineteen graveyards during that summer. Most of them are a blur in my memory, but I vividly remember two of them.
One cemetery was just outside of Mountain City in Doe Valley. I could see the gravestones from the highway, grouped together on a small hill next to a stand of tall white pines. The cemetery was obviously on private land, so I stopped at a house near the bottom of the hill and knocked on the door. It was opened by an elderly man who squinted at me and spoke in a quivering voice. When I asked about the cemetery on the hill, he offered to take me there.
“I haven’t seen those graves in a long time,” he told me. “My mother and father are up there, and a brother and sister who died when they were small. I’d like to visit them one last time before I die.”
He clutched my right arm with a shaky hand as we slowly made our way through a field and along a fence of rusted barbed wire, finally reaching a rickety gate, which he unlatched. We followed a narrow path that led upward along the side of the hill until it reached the grove of pine trees. In a small clearing that was open on one side, toward the highway down below, were two rows of old tombstones, battered by d