Residents of Henderson County have had a bad habit of profaning sacred ground.
Lord knows how many small, rural graveyards have been plowed over. The late, great Jim Blue documented as many cemeteries that he could find and published the results in both a map and a book, “Gone But Not Forgotten,” published in 1996 and revised in 1997.
I can’t imagine the number of hours Jim spent bushwacking through brambles to find them all; I throw up my hands in horror when I contemplate trying to document how many of them remain.In this column I’m taking on the more modest task of telling y’all about the number of times the city of Henderson has dedicated land as a cemetery — and then decided to use it for something else.
It began with the city’s original cemetery at the northwest corner of Fourth and Elm streets, which operated until the city bought Fernwood Cemetery. E.L. Starling, in his “History of Henderson County,” says “a large majority of those who died from 1800 up to 1849” were buried there.