Daily News Journal, March 28, 2014
SMYRNA — For most of its history, Rutherford County has been rural with family farms dotting the landscape.
Stones River National Cemetery, May 23, 2015
Over the past 200 years, families, farms and entire communities have come and gone leaving little in their wake.
The one exception is cemeteries.
Most are small family plots associated with old family farms. Others are the final resting place of a community, like Cannon Cemetery in Smyrna.
In the 1970s, Rutherford County Historian Ernie Johns and others from the Historical Society undertook the painstaking task of documenting nearly 800 cemeteries in the county, Rutherford County Archivist John Lodl said.
“He literally went door-to-door knocking and marking them on a map,” Lodl said.
Now Lodl and others are embarking on an ambitious plan: to locate and mark those cemeteries using today’s technology.
Tennessee State Historian Dr. Carroll Van West said the project should be conducted across the state to help guide future development around landmarks of the past.
“Not only will the survey help local government make better decisions and help property owners know more about these heritage assets, it also helps us at the MTSU Center for Historic Preservation train the next generation of historians and preservationists. Many thanks to (Rutherford County) Mayor (Ernest) Burgess for his leadership in this important project,” said West, who is also the director of the Center for Historic Preservation.
Lodl explained the overall goal of the projectis to digitally map and record all the cemeteries in the county, no matter how small or how large.
Just last week, Lodl, along with a guide from the Tennessee National Guard base, Smyrna historian Toby Francis, and field researchers from MTSU’s Center for Historic Preservation Michael Fletcher and Catherine Hawkins, located and marked the large Cannon Cemetery.
The cemetery is located on the National Guard base along the banks of J. Percy Priest Lake.
While most cemeteries only contain a handful of graves, the Cannon Cemetery has more than 300 with 200 headstones.
The cemetery contains representatives from some of the first families of Rutherford County, said Francis, Smyrna resident and historian.
Francis said early settlers from the Goodloe, Chapman, Brackin, Weakley, Hibbett, Hunter, Gooch, Goodwin and Thompson families are located in the cemetery.
“It represents some of the most prominent families in the area,” Francis said.
It is also the resting place for at least three Revolutionary War veterans and possibly Hugh Lawson White, a Whig party candidate for United States President in 1836.
Francis explained the cemetery is located on what was once a main road between Old Jefferson, Smyrna and Gilsville, which would have made it a good location for a community graveyard.
The earliest grave dates back to 1819 and nearly 450 people were buried there until the Sewart Air Force Base cut off access in the early 1940s and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers flood control effort created J. Percy Priest Lake in the late 1960s.
“Families had no direct route here after the Air Force base and they couldn’t make it back here,” Francis said. He added the last burial was in 1951, but was later relocated with 90 other graves when the lake was formed.
In the years since, the cemetery was forgotten and left to the elements. Now it is overgrown with trees, vines, flowers and bamboo.
Lodl said he partnered with the Center for Historic Preservation, the Rutherford County Office of Information Technology’s Geographic Information System division and and Bradley Academy Museum the cemetery to ensure cemeteries like this are not forgotten forever.
“Subdivisions have been built, roads have been widened, the county has changed since the first cemetery survey was done in the ’70s,” he said. “We want to 100 percent verify the locations with today’s technology.”
Lodl explained the information will then be shared with local planning departments so future development can avoid destroying historic cemeteries.
“The county and developers will know exactly where cemeteries are and we can protect our heritage and our history,” he said.