I know that you have heard the expression before. I had accepted the truth of it as being undisputed until I visited a local cemetery. Bobby Lynn Plemmons and I were visiting the Manila Baptist Church Cemetery here in McMinn County, Tennessee, where many of Bobby's close ancestors are buried, when he told me, "I know of a private cemetery nearby where another Plemons is buried." So off we went. But when we stopped by the side of the road, no cemetery was in view, I thought. We walked less than ten yards from the paved road and were met with massive granite stones, ornately carved, and dating back over one hundred years. You had to be right inside the cemetery before you recognized it as a burial site. Trees grew inside rusted cast iron fencing. Boxwoods, once planted as decoration to gravesites, now grew out of proportion. The name on most of the stones is Burn. Sure enough, here also was a stone of Robert E. Lee Plemons, 39^th Infantry, North Carolina Regiment, CSA, alongside the hand carved stone of Sam Plemons, showing no dates. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. My sister, my mother, and I had been looking for the burial site of my great-grandfather Harrison Blair Burn, and great-grandmother Margaret Elizabeth Barnet Burn, for several years to no avail, and suddenly, unexpectedly, here they were.

When I returned later with my sister, Martha Plemons Peterman, she could not believe, either, that this was the correct cemetery. She described a cemetery on a gravel road, in a curve, and near the Burn Family home place. In the fifty years or so since she had visited, the road had been paved and straightened somewhat. The home place had been torn away, and the cemetery had been allowed to grow up. We learned from the local library that the last burial there had been in the early 1940s.

I don't know the feelings of the owners of the farmland which surrounds the cemetery, but I thought of another cemetery that I remember seeing when I was much younger. This cemetery that I remembered from my hunting days when I was young, was near the edge of a wood, and stood in projection out into a pasture. I remember even then that some of the stones were still readable with birth dates back into the 1700s. Many were broken and overturned. Years later, I went back - hunting again - and, at first, I thought I was in the wrong place, because I could not find any grave markers. But then I found them. They had been piled in a fence-row nearby. The trees around the cemetery had all been cut down and the fences straightened. The cemetery was now part of the pasture.

Is this the fate of the Burn Family Cemetery and other small family cemeteries like it? How many other family cemeteries have been lost to careless developing of land for another use? We would like to believe that our gravesites would be protected and respected from now until eternity, but down deep, we know better. Times change - values change - people's ideas change. All we can do is take care of present day and hope for the best.

That is why I am going to try to start cleaning off the gravesites of the Burn Family Cemetery when the weather cools. And even though Harrison Blair Burn disowned my Grandmother for marrying outside what he considered to be her "social class", I will take a certain satisfaction from knowing that one of her descendants has the will to return good for injustice. He cut her out of his will and never spoke to my Grandmother again after she married, but I will say a few words over his grave when I clear the brush away. - Warren Plemons

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