News

Descendants organize to save Pleasant Hill Cemetery

Bob Justus, Patricia McCarson Roberts, Troy Drake and George Drake stand with a newly erected sign that explains the new ownership and plans for Pleasant Hill Cemetery.

By Bill Moss, Published: May 9, 2015

The Drake family’s connection to Pleasant Hill Cemetery goes back 150 years yet just how many Drakes rest there came home to George Drake as he looked around closely.

“In the whole top half of it, it’s really weird to drive in because you see hundreds of tombstones with the name Drake on it,” he said. “Then I found out my great-great grandmother was the first person buried there right at the end of the Civil War.”
She was Sarah Elizabeth Barton Drake, who died in 1865 at the age of 80.
Thanks to Drake and a core of other workers, Pleasant Hill is undergoing changes that may save it for perpetuity. Drake is one of the leaders of a small group that got together starting last summer to save the historic cemetery. The last caretaker for the cemetery, Jerald “Pete” Summey, told Drake that the upkeep and lack of funding had become too much.
Since then, the group formed the Pleasant Hill Cemetery Association and began researching the grave sites in greater detail. Drake and other trustees — distant cousins — pieced together the origins. The cemetery started out as a Drake family graveyard, they think, before it became associated with Pleasant Hill Baptist Church, on Little River Road at Kanuga Road.
“It was actually the backyard of my great-great-great uncle,” he said.
Thanks to painstaking research by Troy Drake, another committee member and descendant of many of the people underfoot, the association has identified many of the gravesites.
“We expanded the list from 30 to 300 by researching obituaries and finding relatives,” Troy Drake said. He had first done research in 2002 and picked it up again last year.
There are nine Civil War veterans buried at the Old Kanuga Road graveyard, from both sides. The committee plans a burial on July 25 of King David McCarson, a Confederate soldier. That’s around the date McCarson was freed from a Union prison camp in New York, said Patricia McCarson Roberts, a descendant.

Cleaning up

Committee members formed a work crew and hauled off two huge loads of brush. They’ve weeded and pruned. They’ve scrubbed headstones that age and neglect had rendered unreadable. Most important of all, they’ve set up a long-term funding plan to Pleasant Hill going. Last week, the Baptist church deeded the property to the association, which is legally set up as a nonprofit corporation.
“The deacons signed over the property to us,” George Drake said. “They said, ‘We’re not going to take care of it; we don’t have any money.’”
The association now confronts a confusing past, a lack of records and word-of-mouth promises. Trustees of the association are trying to get the word out to family members and Pleasant Hill congregants who may have been promised a gravesite. A Facebook page has become active with comments and family photos and support; the association also launched a GoFundMe site to raise money.

‘A potter’s field’

“We have a list of folks that have contacted the Pleasant Hill Cemetery Association about promised plots and will start placing identifying plot markers for each of these future burial plots,” the association said in a letter. “Please have patience as we have been busy with other efforts to secure the financial standing of the cemetery and to create a perpetual fund. One of the Trustees will contact you as soon as possible to meet about promised plots at the cemetery.”
George Drake says the cemetery has been unregulated for a long time.
“What we found out is it’s a potter’s field,” he said. “You didn’t have to have a vault or a liner. Funeral homes were sending people out there because there weren’t any charges.”
Melody Shepherd of Thos. & Son Funeral Directors said the funeral home did receive a letter from the new owners. As far as its history as a free graveyard, she said she did not know.
“I think the biggest problem that they’ve had is that they don’t have a vault or container requirement so there’s a problem with graves sinking over and over again,” she said.
Besides adding that requirement, the association has added charges for the owners of burial sites.
“It is evident that contributions alone will not provide funds for future maintenance of the cemetery,” the trustees said in their letter. “We must establish a perpetual care fund for this purpose, so that it will not be a year to year struggle for routine maintenance and improvement of the cemetery from this point forward.”
Those who have been promised a plot must pay a $250.00 perpetual care fee per burial. Those reserving a plot now will pay $500; the fee rises to $750 next year. New rules also govern markers, curbing, flowers and other appearance and maintenance issues.
“For the most part, folks have been somewhat courteous,” George Drake said. “There’s some resistance, some don’t want to pay anything because that’s been the history of this place. They haven’t paid anything.”
Without the new rules and the charges for long-term upkeep, the trustees say, Pleasant Hill can’t survive. It’s important to the Drakes that it does.
“To me one of the most unique parts of this, our ancestors owned the property that started this cemetery,” George said. “This has come full circle. I had no idea this place had any relationship to Drake until my parents were buried here down at the bottom section. Now it’s returning back to the ancestors who actually started the cemetery.”