Fannie Morgan, mother of author Robert Morgan, vividly recalled an old cemetery in the Green River cemetery.
As a young child, Morgan played in a wooded area off Terry’s Creek Road in the Green River community. In the forest was a cemetery.
“There were stones everywhere,” she said. “I don’t remember seeing any writing on them.”
Morgan was 3 when her father, Robert Hampton Levi, and his brother bought the property. The property was owned for many years by Daniel Pace and his descendants. Pace obtained the land in the early 1800s from the Justus family, Morgan said.
Some descendants of the Justus and Pace families say the graves were not of those family members. They state that the location is known of the Justus and Pace family graves.
Detailed research on these families, especially the Justus family, indicates that this statement is not completely accurate. There are several members of the Justus family whose grave sites are not known, including the Justus descendant who originally owned the land.
It is possible the graves date earlier than those families, placing the graves in the late 1700s or early 1800s.
“They might be early settlers who came in or maybe slaves,” Morgan said. “There were about 75 graves in there.”
The children went to the wooded area to gather chinquapins.
“We picked up gallons in the fall,” she said. “I had four brothers. They thought the graves were Indian graves.”
There were stories of an Indian campground nearby, she said.
The graves could not be Cherokee graves. The early Cherokee did not mark graves with field stones, according to Cherokee historians. Morgan said the grave stones were definitely at the cemetery in the early 1930s.
Jay Jackson with the Henderson County Cemetery Advisory Committee visited the location twice. Two possible sites in the densely wooded tract were searched, with no grave stones located. Because of the terrain and the poison ivy covering the area, a thorough search could not be conducted.
Morgan wanted the location noted on the county’s cemetery list and on the GIS system. She does not want the land developed and houses to be built over graves.
The Henderson County Cemetery Advisory Committee voted in a meeting in 2006 to add this cemetery to the county’s official list.