If a cemetery could talk...
Backwoods graveyards tell the stories of forgotten communities and the people who lived there
On a whim, I stopped by Chimney Rocks Cemetery in the Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area.
It was a beautiful fall day, and I whipped my Jeep into the cemetery’s muddy, pitted driveway almost without thinking. I’ve visited this cemetery more than once, of course. And I’ve written about it more than once. But usually I drive by without stopping, and without thinking about it. Most people do. That’s why the sprawling cemetery has deteriorated into an unkempt condition, its head stones illegible and saplings overtaking some of the graves.
The Big South Fork NRRA sprawls across 125,000 acres in Tennessee and Kentucky, making it the fifth-largest national park in the eastern United States. Before the federal government moved in, the BSF region was sparsely settled. But the Station Camp area was a hub of civilization. Between Station Camp Creek and No Business Creek, several hundred people carved out a livelihood. There were schools, a church, general stores, grist mills, and even a community baseball team. It’s in this part of the now remote BSF that Chimney Rocks Cemetery is located.
The settlers who made this area their home didn’t know it as Chimney Rocks Cemetery, of course. They called it Slaven Cemetery, after the original land owner, Pa Slaven, who was buried there in 1887. Many of those buried in the cemetery are Slavens, or their relatives. But the cemetery pulls its official name from the sandstone buttes that stand sentry over the roadway as a natural monument just to the north of the graveyard.
Any exploration of Chimney Rocks Cemetery has to start with the grave of Angeline Moore, of course. The modern stone isn’t an original; it was placed more than 100 years after her death. But it marks the grave of the very first person buried here, in 1872.
Young Angeline was found dead on nearby Huckleberry Ridge on Jan. 6, 1872. At the time, the main road from Huntsville in Tennessee to Monticello in Kentucky ran along Huckleberry Ridge. A story in the Knoxville Daily Chronicle at the time of Angeline’s death noted, “The body bore evidences of brutality and inhumanity at the contemplation of which a demon might shudder.”
When her body was discovered, Angeline had a broken collar bone and rib. One eye had been smashed in and, according to the newspaper, “the entire body, most horribly mutilated, bore witness to refined cruelty, which is at once sickening and a burning shame to advanced civilization.”
An investigation into the girl’s death revealed that she wasn’t truly an orphan; her mother was very much alive and well. But she had been indentured to a Huntsville woman. Witnesses said that she had been driven from the woman’s home “by harsh treatment” and had been wandering through the mountains, “homeless, friendless, freezing and starving.”
Still other witnesses said that the woman to whom Angeline had been indentured was spotted riding with the girl on her horse during the night. Speculation was that she was going to drop her off at the settlement along the river, far from home, expecting her to make her way to the settlement and find refuge there.
The woman and her daughter were indicted on murder charges by a grand jury, but were never convicted. History doesn’t tell us what became of them. As for young Angeline, her body was buried near the twin Chimney Rocks, and a new cemetery was started.
Wandering through the headstones — many of which are illegible, some of which are marked by a simple field stone — I come across the grave of 26-year-old Daniel Pennington.
Given that Pennington was the second person to be buried at Chimney Rocks, you might expect his grave to be side-by-side with Angeline’s. Instead, the two graves are located in opposite corners of the cemetery.
Like most of those buried at Chimney Rocks, Dan Pennington was a part of the Slaven family. He married Susanna Slaven, the granddaughter of Richard Harve Slaven. Harve Slaven was a Revolutionary War veteran who settled along No Business Creek and is believed to be the first permanent white settler in this region. Susanna was named for her grandmother, Susanna Mabel Mounts Slaven.
For one reason or another, Dan Pennington wound up in a fight with his wife’s brother, Elias Meshack Slaven, in 1872. His wife was five months pregnant with their first child. During the fight, Slaven fired a gun at Pennington. Pennington returned fire, striking Slaven in the shoulder. Probably fearing retaliation, he left his home and hid in the underbrush nearby. It wasn’t long before another of his wife’s brothers, Steward Riley Slaven, approached Pennington and shot him.
Steward Slaven packed up his belongings and fled the Station Camp community, telling others there was no need for the law to go after Meshack because it was he who had killed Dan Pennington.
Both Meshack and Steward were indicted for Pennington’s death, but neither ever stood trial. Another man, Anderson Lewallen, was also indicted but was acquitted.
Four months after Dan Pennington’s death, Susanna gave birth to their son, William Marion Pennington. William left the Big South Fork for Missouri and eventually wound up in California. Susanna also left the region, settling in Mt. Pisgah, Ky. Steward and Meshack both left and never returned, as well.
I also saw the grave of Victoria Blevins, the 3-month-old daughter of John Newton and Amanda Blevins, who died in 1905. Her 14-year-old sister, Sarah Blevins, is also buried in the cemetery.
Neither Newton or Mandy Blevins are buried there, but their story is another BSF tragedy. In 1924, Newton was charged with first degree murder after shooting and killing William Clayburn Hatfield, whose brother was married to Newton’s sister. The killing was over some apples that children from the community had taken from Hatfield’s orchard.
On Oct. 25, 1924, Newt and W.C. Hatfield met in High Point, just south of Oneida, and traveled to the Blevins home. After dinner, an argument began over the apples. An argument ensued, and Hatfield charged Blevins with a knife, stabbing him in the chest. In the tussle that ensued, Blevins shot Hatfield with his rifle. Hatfield died two days later. Blevins was eventually convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to one year in prison.
W.C. Hatfield was a cousin to Devil Anse Hatfield, the patriarch of the Hatfield family during the infamous Hatfield & McCoy feud.
Later, Newt Blevins — a great-grandson of Richard Harve Slaven, the BSF’s original settler — was shot and killed as he and Mandy rounded up cattle near their home. No one was ever convicted of the murder.
Then there’s the grave of little Shirley Faye Crabtree, who was just seven months old when she died in 1936. Shirley was the step-granddaughter of W.C. Hatfield. Hatfield was the second husband of Poppy Blevins, the mother of Lottie Blevins.
Lottie Blevins — the granddaughter of John and Elvira Litton, who settled the Litton Farm that hikers can visit in the BSF backcountry near Bandy Creek — was just 19 years old when she married Claude Crabtree in 1931. Five years later, in February 1936, she gave birth to Shirley, their first child. But she died just four days later, presumably from complications of childbirth. She was buried at Chimney Rocks.
That September, baby Shirley fell sick and died, as well. She was buried next to her mother in the cemetery.
Claude Crabtree eventually remarried and moved to Texas. But he never had another child.
There’s the head stone of Emily “Emma” Burke, a modern commercial stone that replaced the original sandstone that was placed following her death in 1926.
The great-granddaughter of Richard Harve Slaven, the Revolutionary War veteran who was the first white man to settle in Big South Fork Country, Emma married Diance Burke, the great-grandson of Jonathan Blevins, another of the BSF’s first white settlers. She died, along with her baby, in childbirth on April 21, 1926. She’s buried in between three of her babies.
There’s the grave of Pvt. David Smith, who as a teenager was one of many people from the region who snuck across the state line into Kentucky to join the Union Army during the Civil War. Scott County, which the Station Camp community was a part of, seceded from Tennessee following Tennessee’s secession from the Union, and formed the Independent State of Scott as a protest to secession. Scott Countians voted 541-19 against secession, the largest margin of any county in Tennessee.
There are other graves, too. Sixty-six in all. Most of them have stories to tell. Some have stories that will never be told because the words inscribed on the stones are no longer legible. The soft sandstone was quarried nearby and time and the weather have rendered them illegible — if they were ever inscribed to begin with.
But the rest of the stones stand as a testament to the hardscrabble life that was once waged in this remote and rugged part of the northern Cumberland Plateau. Once you’ve heard their stories, you begin to understand these people, and why they insisted on forging a life here despite the hardships that plagued the region.