Cemetery Clearing

This post continues my posts describing our family vacation from August 1- 7, 2009.

Wednesday, August 5th was supposed to be our last day in Talladega for our family vacation last month.  But, we decided on Tuesday that we’d stay another day.  Well, instead of leaving on Thursday, we didn’t leave until Friday. Why? Because we needed to do some cemetery work!
On Wednesday of that week, we took the kids by the family cemetery to visit the gravesites of family members.  On this trip to Talladega, we were ecstatic to learn that a local masonic lodge was now taking care of the cemetery and had even placed a sign at the entrance! This cemetery has often been left neglected so we were very happy that a local group was taking ownership.

We started in the cemetery by going to the tombstone of Mama Frances’ husband, Curtis. He passed away in 1971.

Then, we went over to see the grave of Mama Frances’  father, mother & sister, and guess what? We couldn’t find them! This was highly disappointing to us because three years ago, in November of 2006, Kalonji and I cleared out the thicket of branches that were around their headstones. The area was very overgrown.  We had cleared it out so that you could see the three tombstones quite well and this is what it looked like then.  These are the headstones of Champ McClellan, his mom Fannie McClellan, and his daughter Louise.  Fannie would have been a slave on the McClellan property I posted about previously about our visit to the home.

Well, a lot can grow in three years. When we went back to it during this trip, the area was completely grown over again. This is what it looked like and despite the gaps, you see in the picture, there was actually more brush so we couldn’t see anything.

So, we decided to stay another day so that we could get to work clearing it out again. This time, we took out more than just branches. We got an ax and started chopping down small trees. After a few hours of work (including work from the oldest two boys), we were able to do a very effective clearing of the gravesites again. And this is what it looked like when we finished this time.  You can see some of the tree stumps from our use of the ax.

From the work this time around, we realized that there was another grave there that we didn’t know about before, and it was a child grave, unmarked. When we told Mama Frances about this, she said that it was stillborn that had been born to her mom – so that was a birth previously unknown to me. This is the mess we left behind

Kalonji’s stepmom was going to tell the masonic lodge about our work and they were going to come to clear it out. At least they now know that the graves are there and can continue to keep the area clear. Since we had done so much clearing, we were also able to see further back in the thicket and realize that there were even more graves up in there. It was so sad to see how much this area of the cemetery had overgrown. We couldn’t make it back there ourselves, but I sent Miles in to take pictures of some of them.

This is the headstone of Epluribus U. Lee who lived from 1909-1976. Don’t you just love the name! However, his marker is completely hidden in the thicket. Very sad.

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Needless to say, we were all very tired that evening. But, we are so glad that we did this. It is only a start, but hopefully, the lodge can get more people involved to do more clearing. This cemetery has many of Kalonji’s family buried there. It is a black cemetery and the only one in the city not maintained by the city and has a lot of history. There are slaves buried there and many family members of the families in this part of town, including those of another, unrelated so far as we know, the McClellan family. I think we made our ancestors proud this day.