The Summers-Liverett Cemetery is off John Delk Road in the Edneyville community.
The late Kelly Jackson said that he remembered, as a child, attending funerals in this old cemetery.
In 1994, Jackson and George Jones, with the Henderson County Historical and Genealogical Society, surveyed what they identified as the Summers-Liverett cemetery and found two fieldstones and six unmarked graves.
In 2005, the cemetery was located on the property of Calvin Dalton and near the former Nix property, later owned by Joel Reed.
In 2005 nine field stones were located in the woods. Stones appeared to be scattered through a wooded area and the area was covered with thick weeds. There are most likely more stones. It would take much work, cleaning and raking, to get a good count.
Research has turned up only a small amount of local knowledge about the Summers and Liverett families. It is known that Summers’ descendants married into several local families, such as the Justices, but little can be found about the earliest Summers settlers.
The same holds true for the Liverett family. The name also changed the way it was spelled over the years, from Liverett to Liverette to Leverette.
“Many of the Liveretts went West,” Jones said.
A Joseph Liverett, born in 1800 in South Carolina, married Mary Davis, born 1814, in South Carolina. He was the son of Thomas and Sally Liverett. Joseph and Mary’s children were Margaret, born 1832; Sarah, born 1833; Robert Henry, born 1836, who married Mary M. Woodfin; Richard M., who married Nannie Jane Grimes; Charles, born 1842; Rebecca, born 1846; John Riley, born 1850, who married Mary Adeline Byers; Whitfield Albert, born 1852, who married Jane Eliza Reed; Carolina, born 1858; and another child born 1860.
Robert Liverett and his wife, Mary, “bought a 310-acre farm and brick farmhouse from Oliver Moss, a wealthy tobacco farmer,” said a Liverette genealogy at the History Center on Main Street.
This land and farmhouse is now the Historic Johnson Farm near West Henderson High School, owned by the Henderson County School System.
Brothers Vernon and Leander Johnson gave the property to the school system.
In 1913, Robert Henry Liverett got into an argument over farm work with his son, John, and shot and killed him, according to an early newspaper, the Western Carolina Democrat.
The 77-year-old grandfather of Vernon and Leander Johnson then killed himself.
After this family tragedy, Sallie Liverett Johnson, the mother of Vernon and Leander Johnson, moved into the farmhouse to take care of her elderly mother and sister. Sallie Johnson’s husband, the father of Vernon and Leander, had died in 1896.