Finding Chattanooga’s forgotten cemeteries

By William Newlin

This winter, a UTC professor wrote to us with a correction — we had incorrectly reported who owned a cemetery next to campus.

There’s a large green space between E. 3rd Street and Mocs Alumni Drive that’s divided into three adjacent cemeteries. The Mizpah congregation owns one, the Sons of Confederate Veterans is the trustee of another. But the largest one, it turns out, doesn’t have an owner.

The City of Chattanooga maintains the Citizens’ Cemetery, which predates the Civil War by decades, but records indicate no clear ownership of the land (we had incorrectly lumped it in with the Confederate Cemetery in our previous story). And the massive parcel isn’t alone: I found a couple dozen old cemeteries across the city without a known caretaker.

And I went looking for them.

My cemetery hunts in Alton Park, St. Elmo, Avondale, Eastdale and elsewhere turned up a bunch of graves lying in various states of disrepair. A lot of Chattanooga’s oldest burial grounds have been lost over the years, quietly eroding near apartment buildings, behind strip malls, and in backyards.

And I wanted to learn more about these sleepy, kudzu-conquered sites.

First, I called up the expert.

Tennessee’s Historic Cemetery Preservation Specialist Graham Perry has catalogued over 36,000 cemeteries across the state. He told me that forgotten, moldering cemeteries are a common type.

“Back in the 19th century and probably into the 20th century as well, people buried people. And then they said, ‘Okay, well we’ll put this rock here, and this is where grandpa is. In the end, those people end up dying themselves and the information gets lost.’”

Finding out who grandpa was is difficult. But finding out where generations of grandpas are is remarkably easy. Here’s what I did, and what you can do if you find a headstone or two behind your back fence.

I turned first to the county’s geographic information system (GIS).

County GIS

Simply scrolling across Hamilton County’s GIS interface will reveal plenty of hidden graves. They’ve lingered under protection of state law and are helpfully marked in the GIS with a little tombstone icon.

I just clicked on those parcels to get more information, like a link to its page in the property assessor’s data. As with any other property, that should show who owns it, when they bought it, how big it is, its value, and more.

Property assessor’s data

Woah, not so fast. Old cemeteries aren’t like other properties. In the owner section on the property card, some just say “Cemetery.” One on Boy Scout Road in Hixson is owned by “Cemetery Unknown.” (How mysterious.)

So, I checked in with the county Property Assessor Marty Haynes to see what’s what.

He said recording cemeteries laid out before the 1920s “was indefinite at best,” which means Chattanooga’s forgotten cemeteries often don’t have an owner’s name attached. 

And again, that’s a common issue in the world of historic cemetery preservation. Here’s what Perry, the state specialist, had to say:

Unfortunately, those family members might be long gone. Luckily, there’s a way to trace property ownership way, way back — I headed to the county courthouse to visit the register of deeds.

Register of deeds

The register’s office has filed away all deed transfers, liens, tax-delinquency notes, and other property-related documents going back to the county’s founding.

You can find them stored up on the fourth floor of the courthouse. Staff has computerized plenty of data, available for free to inspect in-person and for a fee to access remotely, but visitors still have scour microfilm tapes to peruse the oldest records.

At the office, I found plenty of 19th century papers written in beautiful, often inscrutable cursive script. But I hit the same wall: Old graveyards tend not to have a clear paper trail. 

I asked for the original deed for the Thurman Cemetery, a site with a couple dozen graves deep in St. Elmo. Plenty of Thurmans are resting there, but the register’s office couldn’t find a record of it.

Perry gives the following disclaimer to those who go to the courthouse trying to unravel the mystery of Cemetery Unknown:

“I’m just gonna let you know you’re probably not gonna find this stuff. But that’s where you would go look.”

Help Perry out

If you stumble across a self-owning cemetery in Chattanooga, Perry said to reach out to him. His catalog of the state’s cemeteries continues to grow, and residents can submit a form with the location and any known information about a gravesite.

“There’s no way in heck I’m going to, you know, do historical research on 36,000 cemeteries,” he said. “I’ve got to rely on the public.”

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Contact William at william@chattamatters.com