Graveyard census-takers document the forgotten

Ian Trontz  01/30/1994

The News Herald

(A story about James Williams and Lon Everett and the surveying of Cemeteries in Holmes, Washington and Jackson Counties Florida.)

When the Reeses lost about 1,000 acres of northern Holmes County woods and farm land to taxes decades ago, only the dead were saved.

A one-acre clearing, nearly choked off by wild bamboo and guarded by two rotting cabins, is all that's left. There, 23 stones mark where generations of farmers, veterans, millers and moonshiners were laid to rest.

``This is the best example of a one-family cemetery that I know,'' James Williams said. ``Every single one here is a Reese.''

Cpl. James L. Reese, a World War II veteran who died in 1983, now has a tooth-white marble headstone. The government paid for it and Williams and Lon Everett, a compact 32-year-old accountant from outside Bonifay, hauled it by truck and dolly to the corporal's grave.

``It's one of the most interesting cemeteries around,'' said Williams, a retired farm machinery parts distributor who lives in Lynn Haven. ``It's got the old homestead house still on it.''

A three-foot headstone, more than a century old, lay fractured on the ground. Williams reassembled and propped up its three parts with a wooden stake. The next mild gust would knock it over. Not even stones are permanent.

Last June Everett published the results of a census of Holmes County cemeteries. Williams and Holmes County resident James Best assisted him.

They also laid more than 100 veterans' headstones like Reese's, each weighing 130 pounds or more.

The monumental task took three years.

The three men, who are distantly related, criss-crossed the county in a pickup and visited all 102 known graveyards, sometimes clawing at branches and vines for hours just to find the site had but one stone.

Or none at all.

NO SIGN OF DEATH, OR LIFE

#The Holt cemetery, near Bethlehem in eastern Holmes County, is gone. It was one of eight known all-black cemeteries in the county; just one remains. The only burial marker commemorates a telephone company's fiber-optic cable.

Except for an artesian well that still flows, all signs of life are gone, too.

Early in the century the Alford-Myers company owned the land and a turpentine still there. The bosses housed the black laborers in shanties and paid them in credits redeemable only at the company store.

Federal labor and minimum wage laws drew workers away and more efficient extraction techniques killed the stills in the 1930s. Holt vanished almost as quickly as it appeared.

``It's a typical black cemetery,'' Williams said. ``There's no evidence it ever existed.''

Someone told Everett about the cemetery; otherwise, he would have driven past it. Some cemeteries existed only in personal recollection or collective anecdote.

Including 102 unmarked graves that were successfully identified, the census-takers counted 12,718 graves in Holmes County. The living outnumber the dead by about 3,000.

They also counted 14 cemeteries and 2,766 graves in neighboring Jackson and Geneva, Ala. counties, near the county line where Holmes Countians may have been buried.

The Daughters of the American Revolution took the first cemetery censi in parts of the country in the 1930s. Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration commissioned searches for all buried veterans in 1940. The WPA census had been the last one in Holmes County.

Everett was not paid, and even published the seven-volume survey at his own expense. He donated copies to libraries in Bonifay, Panama City, and Dothan and Geneva, Ala., and individual cemetery lists to churches.

``They were very happy to get those lists,'' Everett said. ``Most of them didn't have a list of people buried there, believe it or not.''

DUST TO DUST

#The cemeteries were classified as active, without recent burials, neglected and completely lost. Buried there are the mourned, remembered, forgotten and abandoned.

A century ago they were buried the same day they died, in crates of rough timber. The sites were marked with wooden crosses or stakes.

The markers disappeared by wind, fire or plow. The caskets and bones rotted away and left a dimple in the ground. Finally, topsoil filled in the depression.

Just west of the Choctawhatchee River, off of County Road 179-A, lay a cemetery about the size of a basketball court.

A grassy embossment rises two feet from the field, which has been plowed. There are no markers.

Out of respect, the farmer has spared the site. Either way, it's worth peanuts.

``Probably when that family leaves, it'll just disappear,'' Williams said. ``The lady who lives at the house said she could remember as a kid there were some wooden stakes here. We don't know if it's a black cemetery or white. Nobody will ever know who's here.''

Destroying a burial ground is illegal. ``But it's a law that's never really enforced,'' he said forlornly.

They named it the Baker cemetery, after the town.

The more foresighted used oyster shells to mark graves. Some plots in the Smith cemetery, near Pleasant Ridge in western Holmes County, are sprinkled with shards of purple glass.

Everett and James Best plan to install crosses fashioned of PVC pipe and filled with concrete, modern versions of the two-stick crosses.

``It's the most economical way,'' said Best, a 29-year-old Civil War buff. ``The overall concern is to mark the graves. Our ancestors used what they had, so maybe they wouldn't mind so much if we used PVC.''

Across dirt and clay roads where passing drivers always acknowledge each other (top hand on the steering wheel, four fingers extended), is the Hudson Hill Cemetery, in Prosperity.

It once was called the Brownell Cemetery, after a family of 19th-century county officers including a judge, sheriff, county commissioner and clerk of courts. There lie the two oldest identified graves in the county -- Fannie Brown, whose dingy two-foot high stone says she died Feb. 12, 1858; and Frances Angeline Brownell, who died later that year.

The name was changed when the adjoining Hudson Hill Church, a white concrete box, went up. Its members still are buried there.

The cemetery and the church, like most of the county's churches and cemeteries, are not picturesque. There are a few hills west of the river, but the landscape generally is flat. The horizon rarely is visible because of pines.

But Williams doesn't care much for visuals. He enjoys the history that lies beneath the surface.

``It takes something away from the cemetery when they change the name,'' Williams said.

HEALING AVOCATION

#Two things are certain in life, and Everett counts both of them.

By day he's the head accountant for the Holmes Correctional Institution in Bonifay. On off-days and late summer afternoons, he counts the dead.

He inherited this somber avocation from his father, Bill, who was head of the Bethlehem Church Cemetery Committee.

A year after beginning the project, Lon's sister, Kathleen Everett Reeves, died of cancer at 41. Seven days later, Bill died of a massive heart attack at 83.

Lon learned cemeteries don't just entomb the dead. They also heal the living.

``Staying busy really helped me get over that,'' he said. He now holds his father's position on the committee.

Everett also has completed a cemetery census in Decatur County, Ga., and a project identifying World War I veterans in Holmes, Washington and Geneva counties.

He lives alone in Live Oak, a bachelor and weekend warrior: designer sweaters, faded blue jeans and two Chevy pickups (a 1991 S-10 for work and a scratched-up 1984 full-size for the hard-to-reach places). He sold his '68 Mustang two years ago.

``I always wanted one, but I guess after I got one I didn't want it that much anymore,'' he said.

Williams, his lanky sidekick, is somewhat less dichotomous. He's of the brown plaid shirt over brown pants persuasion.

Cemeteries were once his hobby, too, but these days it's a full-time job. Now 60, widowed and retired from his job in Maryland, he passes much of his time researching his family history in fields, libraries and the brittle archives of county newspapers.

One afternoon in the Bay County library, he met Everett, who had volunteered to do the census for the Holmes County Historical Society. They decided to work together because of their related interests.

FOLLOWING OLD TRAILS

#They learned they were related, too.

MDBU MDNM Both are great-great-grandsons of William T. and Rebecca Daniel Whitaker, who owned farmland in Bethlehem, north of Bonifay. William, a veteran of the Indian Wars, died in 1871, and Rebecca died in 1900.

Best descends from James D. Whitaker, William's brother.

William's parents, Jordan John and Catherine Whitaker, were the first Floridians in the clan. They moved from Georgia to Orange Hill, south of Chipley in Washington County.

Williams knows most of their stories and can name Whitaker veterans all the way back to the Revolutionary War. Even earlier was Alexander Whitaker -- who baptized Pocahantas -- and his father, William W. Whitaker, who taught at Cambridge University. In fact, Williams has found Whitakers in England back to the year 1000.

Some of his most compelling reports concern their deaths.

Like that of Pvt. John L. Whitaker of the 6th Florida Infantry, Company G. At 22, he was mortally wounded in one of the last battles of the Civil War.

He was taken by train to a hospital in Thomasville, N.C., but could not be saved. He was buried there. The war ended less than one week later.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans placed a veteran's stone for him in Wilcox Cemetery near Bethlehem, a vintage graveyard on old Wilcox family land.

Catherine Whitaker outlasted Jordan John by 30 years. She moved in with James D. Whitaker, her other son and forebear of James Best, who lived just north of the Alabama line.

But she wanted to be buried with her husband.

``Family tradition said they took her by wagon to Orange Hill,'' Williams said. ``It must have taken three days.''

No one knew exactly where the two were buried and Washington County cemetery records were no help. Perplexed descendants laid their headstones in the Wilcox graveyard, as good a guess as any.

In 1851, Wilie Everitt of Orange Hill wrote his will. He stated he wanted to be buried ``on his Whitaker land,'' the land he bought in 1835, after Jordan John Whitaker died.

Williams recently found the will at the Washington County courthouse. That's how he deduced where Jordan John and Catherine Whitaker were buried -- the old Everitt cemetery.

``It's circumstantial evidence,'' he conceded.

``Genealogy just comes natural to him,'' Everett said of Williams. ``You have to be a detective to follow a trail 100 to 200 years old. That's pretty intense detective work.''

COLLECTORS

#They inventoried history, then squirreled it away in every corner of this poor and rural county, in dense stands of cedar, birch, pine, chinaberry and bamboo.

At the end of a dirt road off of County 179-A, a half mile from the Alabama line, is the Reese homestead. Or what's left of it -- five-sevenths of a share in a one-acre lot.

The graves and rustic cabins imply old ghosts. But the family lived in one of the cabins as late as the 1980s, despite not having running water, according to Thomas White, a neighbor.

The decor inside comprises musty sofas, orphaned sneakers, abandoned wasp nests and emptied beer bottles.

``Sometimes a carload of elderly people comes up and they ask where the cemetery is,'' Andrea White said. ``I tell them and say, `Knock yourself out,' and they do. Then we never see or hear from them again.''

The Whites own 360 acres of the old Reese spread and their property surrounds the graveyard. When some Reese heirs needed cash a few years ago, the Whites bought a two-sevenths share of the cemetery tract.

Parrot Creek, which drains southern Geneva and northern Holmes counties for five miles until the Choctawhatchee, runs by the Whites' land. There's still a bulkhead on the banks for what may have been a grist mill.

Water wasn't all that flowed on Parrot Creek. Shards of glass reflecting moonlight hint at a more profitable venture.

Fourteen of the 23 graves are for children under 10; nine of those died before their first birthday, footnotes to family history. Some stones were taller than the bodies beneath them.

Almost every cemetery has them, children who succumbed to illnesses like influenza, too far from a doctor's care. Many of their stones, if their families could afford them, are topped by carvings of sitting lambs.

FAMILY ROOTS

#The Reeses scattered from Alabama to Texas, the Whites said.

Dora Johnson's family has left Holmes County, too. But they'll be back.

Her husband, Ray, fenced off an acre of land in front of their house near Bethlehem and kept it in escrow for family burials. Ray redeemed his plot 11 years ago, at 68.

``He said when people were buried in church cemeteries, their families forgot them and their graves grew up with grasses and weeds,'' said Dora, 73. ``He wanted to be buried where he knew his family would remember him.''

Dora's name is engraved next to her husband's on a joint stone. The only other person buried there is her grandson, Sheldon Anderson, who was shot to death in 1990. He was 30.

Tindells, Bushes and Browns have been buried in the Brown cemetery, between Noma and Graceville, since 1876.

The grass is cut, the marble stones are immaculate white -- non-chlorine bleach cleans best -- and old pines have been removed.

``We didn't want them falling over on the graves,'' Durell Bush said.

Bush lives across the road, about 100 yards from where he'll lay. He owned the graveyard for 30 minutes one day.

``My mother deeded the land to me when she died,'' said Bush, 67. ``I immediately turned it over and deeded it to the Brown Cemetery. I didn't want anybody using it for anything but a cemetery.''

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