CARROLLTON - Many don't even know it's there, but Oakwood Cemetery isn't lost. It is hidden in tangles of undergrowth on the wooded ridges and deepening, widening ditches south of the courthouse.
During the past decade, the old town cemetery has experienced its most dramatic period of decline since the 1930s and '40s, when bones and coffins would wash out of their graves. They would stick out of the steep eastern edge of the principal ridge and from the bank on the northern side before finding their way into the hands of callous youths or washing into the roadside ditch and on down into Tanyard Branch.
Erosion is still the enemy of this hallowed, largely forgotten ground. Yet storms during the past decade have uprooted majestic trees, their corpses now rotting into the fragmented lot fences they damaged. In falling, their trunks and branches broke tombstones. The litter of the trees covers other monuments, as does the shifting soil.
Who cares?
There are many who do.
The bodies of both blacks and whites are interred in the 9.1-acre cemetery. Entering the site from Jackson Road, or Pelham Street Extended, depending upon one's interpretation of town maps, there's a sign designating the lower ground as Bear Marsh Cemetery. That part's off to the right, and it's an active burying ground. On the ridge across the driveway to the south, burying stopped in the early 1960s.
Bear Marsh Missionary Baptist Church, with its congregation of black Christians, is just down the road, on the other side.
One of its elderly members, Mary Frances Jackson Arnold, died several years ago, leaving a behest of $6,000 to $7,000 to be used for the care of the Bear Marsh section, according to James Foreman of Coila, chairman of the church's governing board.
Foreman and other church members erected the homemade sign and did a little clearing. He said, however, that before spending much more of the late Mrs. Arnold's legacy, he is interested in doing something that, so far, hasn't been done-establishing a proprietorship on paper for the northern section of the Carrollton, or Oakwood, Cemetery.
A lawyer, Foreman said, advised that Bear Marsh should simply "claim the cemetery. File a quitclaim deed. We haven't gotten around to doing this yet," he added.
Dozens of graves lie hidden to the north and around the northeastern rim. And there's the continuing threat from the ditches, which have eaten countless graves since the founding of the cemetery in the 1830s.
Foreman has been looking into getting inmate labor to help clear the Bear Marsh section. Inmate help has also occurred to Judy Stanford, who as president of the recently organized Carroll County Genealogical Society, says one of her group's goals is to help preserve and restore local cemeteries.
Restored, the entire cemetery could be a winning link to the past for the little county seat which continues to crumble as it charms visitors and lures historic preservationists. Foreman recalls that in the old days, a wagon road wound down to the cemetery from the old entrance to the town from the south, Lexington Street, starting near the community house.
The road at one point went near the small house of a black man in the hollow behind the courthouse, near the white Methodist church, near Mary Frances Arnold's house on Stonewall Street. The man's name, said Foreman, was "Uncle Jim Mathis. He got to where he didn't like people driving down through there-so people would walk, so they didn't have to go through town."
The landscape has changed over the decades. In the late '70s, a new southern access combining Mississippi 17 and 35 was cut through roughly between the western edges of the cemetery and the water tower, which is across Lexington Street from the community house.
Bennett's Butane moved from U. S. 82 to the newly cut strip. Though there's a buffer strip between the gas company property and the western boundary of the cemetery, Bennett and others speculated buryings may have been carried over into that buffer.
Leonard Marshall, born in 1925, lives in the vicinity. His older brother, Frank, hauled logs from trees cut out of the cemetery with a Fordson tractor - logs that were used by the Works Progress Administration to build the community house.
Now, fund raising is going on to try and restore the community house. It's just a thought, but it seems restoration of the old cemetery would be a fitting sister project.
That Fordson tractor often got stuck in those woods, Marshall said.
Stuck in the soft ground, or stuck in graves, maybe unmarked graves.
Mack Bennett, who owned the gas company, grew up in Carrollton and returned in 1961.
Like many of his contemporaries, Bennett "haunted" the old cemetery as a youth. There would be teen dances Saturday evenings at the community house. Dares would be offered, often set up during the afternoon at a monument in the cemetery. This was in the early 1950s.
"Somebody'd put a quarter on that statue and dare someone else to go down in the dark and get it," Bennett said. "It was a fun thing to do, especially if the kid were new."
Sometimes, the brave soul would hear weird, scary, "whoooooing" noises tormentors made by manipulating strings in cans as he undertook the challenge.
There are tales of bones being brought to the community house, too-bones from Oakwood Cemetery, most likely.
"We used to play in Tanyard Branch as kids," Bennett said. "We'd find bones in there. So someone could have done."
Wessie Gee, whose husband Orman K. "Peter" Gee's family helped settle and build Carroll County, has slowly but surely been working to reclaim and repair her husband's family's large, fenced lot. Gees and related Bingham family members are in a central location on the ridge, which these days is accessible by crossing a footbridge near the driveway.
The striking, oval monument of white marble with its "keyhole to eternity" at the center marks the graves of Peter Gee, 1803-1883, and his wife, Mary Anne Gee, 1807-1883. It was broken and twisted after being struck by a falling monster oak during a storm some years ago.
The carcass of the tree, minus the marring limbs, lies alongside the western boundary of the lot, which is minus much of the fencing. The fence is being repaired.
Most recently, Wessie Gee has toted bleach and other cleaning materials to the ridge and cleaned the marble.
It's easy to let time lapse, to forget the promises those burying the county's pioneering ancestors made and had inscribed on the tombstones and on the monuments, Gee said. Yet, the promises can be reclaimed.
She invites others to do as she is quietly, slowly, persistently, doing.
"When I first started coming here, there were more graves to the east of our lot with dates from the 1700s, that are not here anymore," Gee said. "And we can't find 'Aunt Lucy.'"
Lucy Breckenridge, a black woman, was buried somewhere northeast of the Gee lot, she said. She lived with the Gees all her life, and she was a guiding light during the early years of Bear Marsh Church.
According to the writers of "The Carroll County Cemetery Records," published by Pioneer Publishing Co., of Carrollton, they found her grave in 1967, marked then by a funeral home marker. In 1983 a collection was taken to buy a modest tombstone for her grave; it was installed.
According to the book's writers, Breckenridge died March 16, 1949. She was 109 years, 6 months and 4 days old.
Black and white, the names of the dead at Oakwood are infinitely more varied than "Gee" or "Foreman." They are Marshall, Johnston, Roach, Herring, Mulvihill, Neill, Merrill, Cothran, Wolfe, Shivers, Hemingway, Henley, McMillan, Buchanan, Moore, Sanders, Beall, McMurry, and many more, and those are the ones with markers.
One of the graves, enclosed by its own fence, is that of Sarah Epes Fitzgerald Watkins, who was a plantation wife from Middleton, a vanished pre-Civil War town that would lie between Carrollton and Winona. Her letters made up most of the 1993 volume, "Letters from Forest Place." Her remains were moved to the Carrollton Cemetery in 1978 when a highway came through what had been her peach orchard - her chosen burial site.
Born in Virginia in June 1814, Mrs. Watkins died March 23, 1865.
