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From:
Subject: Civil War Cemetery found in Jacksboro, TN
Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 09:51:57 EDT


Hi Lists,

Julie posted this onfo on her Morgan Co List...It is great news about
finding a Civil War Cemetery

__http://www.knoxnews.com/kns/local_news/article/0,1406,KNS_347_3245037,00.htm
l_
(http://www.knoxnews.com/kns/local_news/article/0,1406,KNS_347_3245037,00.html) _

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Civil War cemetery unearthed

Soldiers' secret graves discovered on hill in Cumberland Mountains

By DUNCAN MANSFIELD, Associated Press
October 11, 2004

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
fieldstones, 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 19-44. 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 Cornett 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 Cornetts 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." [Knoxville News
Sentinal, 10-11-2004]




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