A little-known cemetery in Fayetteville includes a veteran of the Revolutionary War and prominent citizens of the town. An adjacent, unmarked graveyard probably holds former slaves, free blacks and paupers of the area. Both were honored recently by Christian Life Cathedral in Fayetteville, with plaques unveiled last month as a memorial structure was dedicated.
High on a hill above the Northwest Arkansas Mall, the Gehring Chapel Cemetery lies in a peaceful spot -- a wooded area at the dead end of Millsap Road. The cemetery lies immediately east of the church's sanctuary and office building, and the graveyard is immediately east of that.
War Hero Sleeps Here
One tombstone inscription reads: “Samuel Gregg.”
Samuel Ole Gregg was buried at the Gehring Chapel Cemetery in Fayetteville after his death on Jan. 21, 1841. Born Dec. 12, 1757, in Augusta County, Va., Gregg was a veteran of the Revolutionary War.
Gregg’s tombstone — placed by the Marion Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Thomas Fox chapter of the Daughters of the American Colonists in 1933 — notes he was a private in “Buchanan’s Co., Vance’s Virginia Regiment” of the Virginia Militia, which was rolled into the Continental Congress in 1775. The tombstone notes he fought Cherokees in 1774. Several of his family members were killed by Indians in later years.
Samuel and his brother Robert Jr. were present at Yorktown on Oct. 19, 1781, when British Gen. Charles Cornwallis surrendered to Gen. George Washington, according Samuel’s request for a pension from the military. He served under Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette, a French aristocrat who volunteered to fight with the colonists against England. Gregg’s pension was approved, and he received $33 a year for his service in the American Revolution.
“After that, the British retreated, and our army followed them,” Gregg wrote of his war experience. “After heading up from Speedwell’s Iron Works and following the British a few days, my tour was up, and I went home and immediately returned to Yorktown and stayed during the siege until Lord Cornwallis made a surrender of his whole army to Gen. Washington.”
Gregg spent a while in Tennessee, serving as an officer in the Tennessee militia, appointed by Gov. John Sevier, and a tax collector in Loudon County.
Gregg moved to Washington County in 1938 from Alabama to be near his family. His son, Samuel Jr., born in 1800, served under Gen. Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812. Samuel Jr.’s son was Lafayette Gregg, one of the founding fathers of Fayetteville. Lafayette Gregg is buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Fayetteville.
"A lot didn't know the difference between a cemetery and a graveyard," said Steve Dixon, senior pastor of the church. A cemetery includes marked graves and at some point was well-kept. A graveyard is simply that: a yard full of graves.
Gehring Chapel
The historic cemetery carries the name of the old Gehring Chapel church, which in the 1830s stood where the cemetery now lies, reads a history provided by Gayla Henderson, an executive assistant at Christian Life Cathedral, who spearheaded the research and dedication of the burial grounds.
"Historical records indicate that landowner Hosea Cardwell deeded eight acres to the Methodist Church in 1841," the history reads. "One of the earliest known leaders of the church was Hiram Gehring, a Methodist circuit horseback-riding preacher from Tennessee. In 1845, he established a church west of the cemetery. Preacher Gehring contracted pneumonia and died as a result of his horseback rides from Arkansas to Tennessee. The church he established was called Gehring Chapel."
Henderson found no mention of the church between 1845 and 1899, but the church name was noted in 1899 as Methodist Episcopal Church South, while the cemetery still bore the Gehring name. Through 1918, the Methodist Episcopal Church sold parcels of land to Charles P. and Charles S. Stearns, and the cemetery became known as the Stearns Cemetery.
Christian Life Cathedral purchased 14 acres around the cemetery -- which remained privately held -- in 1984, Dixon said. The church took over stewardship of the cemetery last year, reorganizing the Gehring Chapel Cemetery Association and its board of directors to ensure the integrity of the cemetery.
"It just made sense," Dixon said. "We're here to stay. Generations will come here and take care of it."
Members of the church volunteered their time over many summer weekends at the cemetery, clearing brush, cleaning headstones and otherwise preserving the history. The group reached out to community resources, learning to use special cleaners to clear the stone faces. "And it had to be done three times," said Henderson, a member of the team. She noted two members had relatives buried in the cemetery.
"If we don't preserve the headstones, they'll be gone," Henderson said. "Bacteria integrates itself into the stones, and it must be removed. It's hard work, but it really needs to be done."
A list created in the 1970s documents 76 burials in the cemetery. Some lie in family plots surrounded by fencing, while nine low-lying vaults also contain burials. "This was not common in early cemeteries," Henderson said. "Somebody had money."
Well-represented in the cemetery are the Cardwell, Francisco, Bridenthal, Stearns, Hewitt, Stone, Appleby and Oliver families. The oldest dated burial was in 1839, but Henderson suspects that time-worn tombstones might hide earlier dates.
Twenty-six vaults and stones lie damaged, while other graves have no markings at all. Years ago, vandals rode motorcycles through the cemetery, knocking over and breaking stones and vaults, Henderson said. The cemetery association received a bid of $18,000 to professionally repair broken stones, and return them and others to their upright positions. "You just don't superglue them down," she said.
A couple of plots in the cemetery remain empty, but the church will not fill them, Dixon said. "We were not given a list of plots. I just fear somebody has bought a plot, and we don't know about it."
Dixon said the church eventually might construct a columbarium and gardens -- as many churches do -- on the other side of the unmarked graveyard. "We would treat the whole area as a memorial," he said.
Finding the Missing
A communications company wanted to install a cellphone tower on the highest elevation around -- the eastern edge of the church property, explained Dixon. But ground-penetrating radar before construction revealed anomalies underground -- shown as yellow spots on a map -- that closely resembled the anomalies caused by the remains in the marked graves next door.
"These are not unique. (Unmarked graves such as) these are found all over," Dixon said. "But they are to us. We were privileged enough to find out. And I do mean it was a privilege.
"When we recognized them, we knew it was most likely a paupers' graveyard or for free or enslaved African-Americans," he continued. "In those days, white men had cemeteries, and black men had graveyards. There were no records, no headstones, even the plots weren't laid out symmetrically. It lies right outside the white picket fence of the cemetery."
Dixon called on Betty Davis who, because of her interest and research, has made herself something of an expert of early African-American history in Northwest Arkansas. Her great-grandparents, Tabitha and "Esquire" William Davis, came to the area from Tennessee in 1861 as freed people of color. "I was always interested in others who migrated here," she said.
"Reverend Steve came to me wanting to know about people who owned slaves in Northwest Arkansas," Davis said.
Davis joined Washington County Sheriff Tim Helder in singing "Amazing Grace" at the dedication service, which surely honored her godfather Lee Harris. "I'm sure he's buried there because I can't find documentation that he's buried anywhere else," she said.
"Once we raise awareness, we hope that people will come forward with authentication of what's here," Henderson said. "We'll be able to say, 'Something happened here.'"
Dixon contemplates the irony of the graveyard being found on church property. He is proud of the diverse congregation his church has established.
"We are a strongly diverse congregation," he said. "I look around and see diversity in so may different places -- in the choir, in leadership at all levels. At least 30 percent of our church is African-American, and we have members from various international communities in the area.
"I think the cemetery is important for family history," he continued. "We're as dysfunctional as any nation and have no sense of history without a story to attach to it. Here, we've got a group of people who had to fight for their own identity. Marking the graves can give them a sense of history to carry the church into the future."
"If we don't, it will be a loss to the future of all in that cemetery and others," Davis said. "Those bodies there are nameless, and we don't want them to be forgotten souls."
About five years ago, after much searching, Davis found the graves of her great-grandparents in Oak Cemetery in south Fayetteville. "It was like finding gold," this senior citizen said. "It was the chink putting together all the parts of the puzzle. I put my family together. How could you leave someone missing?"
"I consider it sacred ground," Dixon said of the cemetery next door.
NAN Religion on 10/11/2014