There are more than 200 cemeteries and graveyards located in Scotland County — with many left unkempt.
Scotland County Library Director Leon Gyles has been working for the past five years to find and document the cemeteries in the county. Right now, Gyles says there’s around seven burial grounds that he’s been told about or that have been mentioned in old obituaries, but only two of them he knows the estimated locations of.
Gyles explained that what started his desire to track down and document all the local cemeteries spawned from a Florida family who was doing research and wanted to find a family grave. However, they along with library staff couldn’t find the location of it. That is what made Gyles decide to work with the city and GIS to document and find the locations.
“We initially thought that there would be less than a 100,” Giles said. “But that 200 number is a misnumber to a degree. Stewartsville Cemetery, if you go out there, looks like it’s one cemetery but actually it’s three. There are the white people buried inside the fence, immediately outside the fence are African-Americans and around the African-Americans are the Native Americans.”
Before this past spring, Gyles thought he had found most of the cemeteries in the county, but while working with ZV Pate at timber harvest locations, about 10 more were found.
“I’ll let them know if there’s a cemetery on the property and they’ll tell me if they find one,” Gyles said. “They’ll walk the entire property before they begin work and will mark the areas so they don’t touch where the cemetery is.”
As the cemeteries are left intact, many times they can be found in the cluster of trees that sit in the middle of a field or other location, but many times these small cemeteries, while it’s left from being destroyed, no one is taking care of them.
Some of the cemeteries range from having two people buried there to dozens — and there are some like the one near the Laurinburg-Maxton Airport, where the markings for where the headstones had been were still there but headstones were nowhere to be found.
“I really wish someone would come clean some of them up,” Gyles said. “There are a couple that are very decimated … a lot of them are on private property so it’s out of sight out of mind. A lot of the families of the people buried there either live out of state or are too old to keep up with them.”
Part of his process is getting the names, birth dates and death dates off the stones before researching them through the old Laurinburg Exchange papers that the library has on microfiche. It’s by the obituaries printed in the paper that allow Giles to learn of the name of the cemetery.
One in particular is one of several Gibson Family Cemeteries. The cemetery is located at the intersection of Old Stage and Fletcher roads, nestled in a clump of trees in the middle of a cotton field and a timber location that Giles only discovered five months ago when ZV Pate began looking at the property.
The cemetery is overgrown with tree limbs covering many graves and one even toppled over. It’s because of this overgrowth that one woman who lives not far from the area wants to see someone take care of it.
Eva Mae Chavis moved to Gibson more than 50 years ago and has raised her family in Scotland County. When she first moved to the area there had been a road leading to the cemetery and an old wooden church. At the time, locals told her it was a Quaker meeting house and cemetery. Now all the remains is the cemetery after the building burned down and the entire area grew up around it.
“I’d really like for someone to preserve the cemetery,” Chavis said. “It’s a part of history and it shouldn’t be left the way it is.”
The cemetery has 10 gravesites with dates ranging from 1874 to 1953 with primarily Gibson’s and Jordan’s buried there, with the exception of David Rodney Williams, who was the last person buried there.
From the 1700s to 1833, the Quakers made their home in an area of land that was called Rockdale, near today’s Gibson, which puts the location of the cemetery in an area that it is likely those buried there could be of Quaker descent.
In an article he once wrote for The Exchange, Beacham McDougald said that while many Quakers left for the Midwest after the Pine Grove Quaker Meeting House was sold in 1833, those who intermarried into the local population remained behind. One of the most notable names that the intermarried Quakers took was Gibson.
There is, however, no knowledge if the cemetery itself is actually of Quaker descent.
“I wish I could do something myself, but I’m 84,” Chavis said. “I know it will take some money, but I wish someone would care for it.”
Reach Katelin Gandee at 910-506-3171 or at kgandee@laurinburgexch.wpenginepowered.com
