Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Family Cemetery in Port Tobacco

Last Friday I was in town to meet with Port Tobacco Mayor John Hyde to discuss PTAP work and plans. Mayor Hyde lives on Bleak Hill in a house owned by his family for at least three generations and that was occupied by a locally prominent physician. The mayor showed me a broken marble gravestone on the hill above his house and, while walking around the find I noticed several depressions and a small terrace that likely represent the physician's family cemetery.

Mr. Hyde has given permission for the PTAP team to investigate the cemetery to determine its exact limits. Perhaps next month Scott and I will check it out with a couple of tile probes.

Readers may recall that we had previously examined the cemetery at Mulberry Grove, a little more than one mile south of town. Although the one-time home of John Hanson, most of the stones are for the Ferguson family to which the physician at Bleak Hill was related. The small cemetery to the side of the courthouse is also a family plot (although associated with the early 20th-century Baptist church), and it is very likely that there are additional family cemeteries in the area.

Let's face it...Port Tobacco was a fairly large town and it existed for three centuries...we can expect a lot of interments.

Jim

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