“The Ancestors are the ones who take your prayers to God.”
—Sobonfu Somé
on the Dagara belief
about the Ancestors
I didn’t start out trying to get into Love Cemetery. The journey that eventually brought me there was more roundabout. It had started ten years earlier, quite innocently, when I was back in East Texas for a short family visit. My great-grandfather, Stephen John Verhalen, had bought 2,800 acres of land in rural Harrison County to raise peaches but quickly found he needed a variety of crops. His nursery business branched out into arcissus ulbs, rugosa roses, Cedars of Lebanon, Voorhees cedars, American holly, and a wide variety of nursery stock, including crepe myrtles and wisteria. His brothers George and Ray were also in the business, which grew to the point where they shipped a million narcissus bulbs by rail to one grower in Florida alone. I was only following up on a snippet of family history and the history of the nursery they once owned. During the course of that brief trip I made a shocking discovery, and it haunted me for years.
A cousin, hoping to help me with my research, referred me to an elderly local historian, Lydia Drayman Ball. Lydia and I became friends. Tall and slender, still an elegant woman in her late seventies, she was also active, bright, and completely devoted to local history, especially her own family’s, which went back to the 1840s in Harrison County. Though Lydia lived in an apartment when we first met, she still owned the original thousand acres of Blossom Hall, a former plantation built in 1847. There were other stately antebellum homes in the area, but ownership had changed hands as the land was either parceled off or sold out of the builder’s family. Blossom Hall had remained intact, and at that time, in 1993, it was probably the last former plantation in the county that had been owned and occupied continuously by the family that had it built.
Lydia couldn’t drive anymore, so one day my favorite older cousin, Jack Verhalen, and I took her out to the woods to search for an abandoned graveyard that belonged to her relatives. In a sunlit grove within a pine forest, she found six headstones standing in a circle, with names and dates of distant family. She was elated to find them after years of unsuccessful searching. Lydia told us that cemeteries were an invaluable source of information—sometimes, as one goes further back in history, the information carved onto a headstone may be the only record of that person’s life. And in this matter she was an expert. A childless widow, she had traveled to the Eastern seaboard for her family research, going through church records and cemeteries everywhere she went, writing it all down in an even, curving hand to give to each of her nieces and nephews.
Lydia returned the favor we had done for her that day by inviting me to go on a tour of Blossom Hall, her graceful white Greek Revival plantation home. Lydia was so comfortable in the past, particularly in the nineteenth century, that she kept two of the bedrooms in Blossom Hall just as they had been in the late 1800s. The house was just a home to her, but to me it was a living history museum. In the hallway downstairs hung a striking family tree, carefully calligraphed in her uncle’s precise hand.
The dark, heavy mahogany furniture in her uncle’s upstairs bedroom had come up the Mississippi River, the Atchafalaya, the Red River, and Twelve-Mile Bayou by paddle steamer from New Orleans, arriving at Swanson’s Landing on Caddo Lake, less than ten miles east, or Jefferson, farther north, in the days when long shallow-draft paddle steamers plied the waterways between Caddo Lake and New Orleans.
The bed that had belonged to Lydia’s great-grandmother was still covered with the striking red, yellow, and green “Star of Texas” quilt that she had stitched while traveling overland by ox-cart to Texas as a thirteen-year-old girl. A box of watercolors from Paris lay on a table by the window, a remnant of the days when imports from France were not uncommon in the wealthier households of Harrison County. Ball gowns, wedding dresses, and crystal chandeliers from Paris were shipped upriver from New Orleans between the 1840s and 1890s, until Caddo Lake finally became too shallow for the paddle steamers to make the runs that connected the eastern part of Texas to the rich, cosmopolitan, Creole culture of New Orleans, with its French, Haitian, African, Spanish, Native American, and Caribbean influences.
After the informal tour of Blossom Hall, we drove down the pink crepe myrtle–lined drive to Drayman Road. We were headed back to town, but at the point where we should have turned right—the way to town—Lydia told me to turn left and continue down Drayman Road. I followed her instructions.
“Pull over, here, on the right,” she said, after a moment. “I want to show you something.” We got out and walked a few steps to a rusted barbed wire fence that ran alongside Drayman Road.
“Honey, look here,” she said, pointing something out to me, her soft, white hair framing her finely wrinkled face. I couldn’t see what she was pointing to. “My daddy never let anybody plow this end of the field,” she said matter-of-factly. “The slaves are buried here.”
The slaves are buried here. I had no idea how to respond to this news. I looked again; I peered for headstones, wooden crosses, something that would indicate a grave, even just one. I told her that I couldn’t see any graves.
“That’s right,” Lydia said. “You can’t see them because they’re not marked.”
“Not marked?” I asked. “This is an unmarked burial ground?” I had never heard of such a thing. “Why, yes,” she said. She was looking back over the field as though there were nothing unusual about having an unmarked burial ground of slaves on one’s property.
I stood dumbfounded. Why had she told me this? Did she believe that her father’s refusal to let this ground be plowed was a way of honoring the dead? Or that, by telling me, she would establish or preserve her family’s honor? I saw Blossom Hall in a new light, like a night landscape suddenly illuminated by a lightning strike that pulsed for seconds, streaked across the sky, blazed, and then all was dark again. All the artifacts of nineteenth-century life in her home that had charmed me marked her connection to a past that was inseparable from slavery. East Texas in those days was shaped by the profits from cheaply produced cotton: it created riches for some whites—the big planters—and threatened to break not only the backs but the souls of enslaved blacks who worked the fields. On this beautiful afternoon in the countryside that had been home to my family too, the burial ground reminded me that slavery had never really been resolved here or, for that matter, anywhere in this country. That cemetery had been left where it was for more than a century, unmarked but known to her family, a secret history just under the surface.
Lydia rattled on sweetly: “Our cook, Sally, was so afraid to walk past this place when she went home at night that Mother always made one of the Negro men walk with her. Sally was superstitious—she swore this curve on the road was haunted.” Her blue eyes glistened. Lydia chuckled and turned away to look out over the field again. She looked so innocent.
“That Sally! She was a big old woman and sweet, sweet as she could be, but my, she was superstitious. Mother always told us Negroes were like that and we shouldn’t believe such talk, so I didn’t.”
I was so taken aback by her revelation that I could scarcely speak.
In that moment I understood why I had grown up hearing stories during my visits about not going down Drayman Road. The black community said Drayman Road was haunted—and it was. When whites called truth “superstition,” the reality of slavery and the racism that persists could be circumvented, glossed over, ignored, and dismissed. For a time. Sally’s story gave me a different map, and I was learning to read it as clearly as any road sign.
“But Lydia,” I finally managed to get out, “don’t you think the people whose ancestors are buried here would like to know about them too?” I reminded her how much her family history meant to her and how much she had learned from visiting family cemeteries. I mentioned the family tree she’d pointed to with pride in the hallway at Blossom Hall. There must be people living right nearby who have ancestors—relatives—buried here.
She listened, then slowly nodded her head. “Why honey,” she said, “I suppose that’s true.”
“Lydia, don’t you think it’s time to mark this burial ground?” I asked her. Her eyebrows shot up in surprise, her blue eyes opened wide.
“Why honey, I just never thought about that,” she said, smiling as she paused. “Maybe you’re right.”
I was surprised by her openness. As fond and respectful as I was of Lydia, I knew that she was a daughter of the Old South; her world was filled with racial stereotypes that she hadn’t begun to recognize, and yet she seemed to appreciate my concerns. We shared an understanding of the importance of history, and perhaps that understanding could become a bridge over our differences.
In that moment of possibility, a fully formed vision of a ceremony of reconciliation blossomed in my imagination. I saw people, blacks and whites together, performing a rite of healing. First, a stone would be laid to mark this burial ground of nameless enslaved beings. Then I remembered the old “planter’s journal” I’d seen at another nearby plantation. The word journal disguised what it really was: an inventory of property and record of every enslaved person “owned” by the plantation, listed by first name, the only name they had. Chances were that Blossom Hall had such a journal too. It would contain the names of the dead in these graves. The names could be read aloud, and we would dedicate this ground to them. There would be prayers and songs, old-style gospel hymns. Our marker stone would signify the laying down of a new covenant to remember the people enslaved here and to tell their history. We would put to rest the ghosts that haunted this land by finally acknowledging their existence, their personhood.
Lydia interrupted my reverie. “Honey,” she said slowly, “there’s just one problem. I don’t own Blossom Hall anymore. I deeded this place over to one of my nieces, Mary Ann Drayman Birch, in Natchitoches.”
My vision collapsed and disappeared in the afternoon breeze. Lydia went on to tell me how that thousand acres of land had gotten to be just too much for her to care for alone. She had moved into town, at peace with the idea that Blossom Hall would be cared for by someone who loved the place as much as she did.
I would have to call Lydia’s niece and get her permission before anything could happen. “I’m not saying she wouldn’t do it,” Lydia tried to reassure me. “She’s a lovely person. But I don’t know, honey. I think it would be best if you talked to her in person.”
Seven years passed before I telephoned Lydia’s niece, Mary Ann. That was in April 2000. By then, Mary Ann and her husband had left Natchitoches and were living year-round at Blossom Hall. I introduced myself. She already knew of me through Lydia. I told her who my family was; she knew several of my cousins. She promptly invited me for coffee the next morning.
It took a while to get through the pleasantries—how I liked my coffee, what a beautiful spring day it was, still not too hot—and the sorting out of relations: who was kin to whom and who was once-removed. It was all a southern ritual, a form of greeting, and a favorite pastime. Finally I told Mary Ann and her husband, Howland, that Lydia had brought me here years earlier and showed me the unmarked burial ground. I explained that, as a writer, I was fascinated by the historical significance of this discovery. Mary Ann seemed to sit up a little straighter and Howland cleared his throat.
I took a deep breath and said that I thought the burial ground needed to be marked and that I was writing a story about it. After a short silence, Mary Ann said, “Well, I suppose we could think about that.” She turned toward her husband, who said softly, “That’s right.” He smiled. “We could take it under consideration.” Having gotten that far without a breach of civility, I asked them to show it to me again, explaining that I wanted to be sure of its exact location. They did not hesitate, southern hospitality was so ingrained in them. I understood their dedication in a new way, the commitment to making a guest comfortable above all else, and I was grateful for it.
At the burial ground, the Birch’s graciously allowed me to take snapshots of them next to the tree that marks one boundary of the cemetery. Before I left, they promised to think about my proposal. Of course, they would have to talk to the rest of their family, which was large and far-flung. And there was one other issue. Mary Ann didn’t own this land anymore; she’d deeded the parcel with the burial ground to a sister of hers in Beaumont. It wasn’t clear when she had done this or why. Still Mary Ann promised to talk to her sister about the burial ground and to get back to me. She wasn’t comfortable letting me phone or write her sister directly. I would need to be patient.
The next time I returned to Scottsville, six months later, we went through this same ritual of hospitality. Again they politely fended off of my attempt to reach an agreement with them. I tried to appeal to their self-interest. I explained that if Drayman Road were to be straightened out or widened by the county, something they told me they never wanted to see happen, they could prevent that by marking this burial ground. Otherwise the cemetery could be paved over. And though I didn’t say it, I tried to convey the idea that marking the ground wasn’t an issue of color but an issue of being human.
They politely sidestepped my argument. “Won’t you have more coffee?” they asked. “We’ll have to think about that. We still haven’t been able to discuss it with everyone involved. It’s so complicated. We have to consult with the others because they own land around that parcel too.” Another twelve people at least were involved.
After the third or the fourth visit, I realized that the Birches would always be polite and they would always put me off. I had to take a new approach.
Following the suggestion of a friend, I went to some spiritual leaders in the community for guidance, starting with my own family’s pastor at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Marshall, Father Ron Diegel. Yes, this matter needed to be attended to, he agreed, and he suggested that I gather other pastors and ministers and lay leaders from the community and form a committee to address it. He would work with us. He suggested the pastor at Trinity Episcopal Church, Father Steve Sellers. Steve quickly agreed to join the group, and he suggested Rev. James Webb, the pastor at the historic black Bethesda Baptist Church. We soon had a small committee, and without giving any thought to its composition, we had formed a remarkably balanced group that was black and white, male and female, ordained and lay.
At our first meeting, we were joined by Gail Beil, a tall and willowy woman with big blue eyes, who was a fount of local history, especially black history. She was the incoming president of the East Texas Historical Society and a member of the Historical Commission for Harrison County. Gail had spent years working as a reporter for the Marshall Messenger. She and her husband, Greg Beil, were active members of the Methodist Church; it was in response to a church request that they had moved to Marshall three decades earlier. Greg helped set up the science program and taught physics at Wiley College, the liberal arts college founded in 1873 by the Episcopal Methodist Church and the Freedman’s Bureau. Wiley was the first historically black college west of the Mississippi. Gail ran the Head Start program for the city of Marshall.
There were two other laypersons at the meeting, Doris Vittatoe and Nuthel Britton. I had met Doris only once before this meeting: several months earlier, I had finally followed Lydia’s advice to seek her out for her historical knowledge of the area. Doris Vittatoe was the secretary of Shiloh Baptist Missionary Church, the closest black church to Blossom Hall. Like Bethesda Baptist Church, Shiloh dated back to 1867.
I had not yet met Nuthel, though. Doris invited her. When we went around the table that night, Nuthel Britton introduced herself as a farmer and as “the Keeper of Love.” She explained that Love was a black cemetery in the Scottsville area that the descendant community had been locked out of for over forty years. Of course this was before any of us knew the story of Love Cemetery. I was so completely focused on Blossom Hall that not much of what she said about this other cemetery got through. We agreed to look into Love Cemetery after we had taken care of the matter at hand, Blossom Hall After each person had spoken about why he or she was there, I laid my dilemma in their hands. This was their community. Did they think the burial ground at Blossom Hall should be marked? Was this important?
Their answer was unanimous: yes, it was very important and long overdue. We should work together to get it marked.
But despite the good will and enthusiasm of our committee, we made no headway marking the ground at Blossom Hall. A small group of us met with Mary Ann and Howland Birch; again, they were unfailingly polite, but again they had reason after reason why we needed to wait. Meanwhile, at our second committee meeting—in March 2003—Nuthel brought up Love Cemetery again. This time she had brought the original handwritten 1904 deed of 1.6 acres by a local landowner, Della Love, to “the Love Colored Burial Association.” That little parcel was only a few miles from Blossom Hall, as the crow flies. Nuthel asked Doris and me to go with her the next morning to see Love Cemetery. “It’s so peaceful out there,” she explained.
That was how I got to Love Cemetery for the first time on that Saturday when Nuthel and Doris and I slipped through the gate. It was my first visit to the place that would become the center of my life for the next four years. But even then, I didn’t understand the scope, or the difficulty, of the project that lay ahead.
In May 2003, we had the third meeting of our burial ground committee at Gail Beil’s Victorian home in Marshall, and I reported on our lack of progress at Blossom Hall. Doris and I had visited the Birches together, but to no avail.
By that May meeting, I had been to Beaumont and tracked down Mary Ann’s sister and met with her for hours myself. Elizabeth Drayman Simmons had no objection to marking the ground and suggested the possibility of donating the land to mark it properly as a cemetery, but at the end of our talks, she put the issue back in the lap of the Birch family, since they actually lived near the burial ground. She would not act without their agreement. And so I returned yet again to meet with Mary Ann and Howland Birch. By then, the buffer of good manners was wearing thin, and relations were becoming tense. Howland in particular was testy, insisting that any historical marker the county might put up to mark the ground would surely be torn down overnight, though he didn’t know who would commit such vandalism. But it was quite clear that the Birches would not willingly allow the burial ground to be marked or named or understood as the powerful symbol it was.
Leaving our meeting at Gail’s that balmy night, I walked Nuthel back to her car. As we descended the many steep steps from the front porch to the walk, I held her right arm to steady her and felt how frail she was getting. Nuthel would be eighty that summer, she told me. “I would sure like to see Love cleared up before I die,” she said.
This time, I knew what she was talking about. I had been to Love Cemetery and seen the powerful effect that the rediscovery of an ancestor’s grave had on Doris and Nuthel. When that unseen tree had fallen as we left, I had felt the truth of Nuthel’s explanation: “That’s just the Ancestors lettin’ us know that they’ve seen us, and that they’re happy we’re here.”
I told her I’d do whatever I could to help. She asked me to track down the timber management company that oversaw the land and find someone who could give us the combination to the lock on the gate. Nuthel wanted us to have grave-cleaning days like they used to have to keep the Ancestors happy and restore Love Cemetery to its proper state. Her calls to the timber company in Louisiana had gone unreturned for months.
I opened her car door and helped her inside. She talked all the while. “I would surely be happy to see people coming back to Love to have those reunions with their families and remember who their ancestors are and do some cleaning up,” she repeated. The door clicked shut. “I would really like to see that before I die.”
I stepped back up onto the curb. Nuthel started up her engine and drove off, then made a U-turn. As she turned, I noticed that she’d failed to turn on her headlights, so I dashed out into the street, calling for her to stop. “Lights! Nuthel, turn on your lights!” I said when I caught up to her. She gave me a big smile, turned them on, and drove off. I stood there in the middle of the street watching her red taillights fade into the darkness.
I was being presented with a choice that humid East Texas night. As I drove away from that meeting at Gail’s house, I recalled a story I’d first heard many years ago not too far from here, fifteen miles north, over at Caddo Lake, from an elderly woman named Mabel Rivers. Mabel told me about her husband Leon’s grandfather, Sam Adkins, who used to live with them. He’d grown up in slavery. As a boy of eight, Sam had been brought upriver from New Orleans and put on the auction block and sold away from his family. As a child, he staved off hunger by sweeping up the spilled flour on the floor around the master’s barrel to make rough biscuits for himself. In his later years, young Mabel helped take care of him. She told me that no matter how hard his life had been, there was nothing in Sam Adkins but sweetness. In those days she worked as a maid in a fishing camp on Caddo Lake. One day she came home from work and slammed the door, yelling, “White people can sure enough be mean. I hate white people!” Sam rose up from his rocking chair, his tattered Bible in his hands, and holding it up like a cup, offered some simple, unexpected advice. “You got to choose love, Mabel,” Sam told her. “You got to choose love when there’s reason to hate. Choose love, Mabel. Hate dries you up—makes your heart bitter. Choose love, Mabel. Choose love.”
Yes, I thought, that will have to be the way for me too. That’s what I need to do, let go of Blossom Hall and choose Love Cemetery. And I could start immediately.
During my visits to East Texas, I used to stay at the home of my cousins Jack and Agnes Verhalen. The house, built by my great-grandparents, was actually two houses built Spanish-style around a central courtyard with a red tile-covered walkway that connected the two sides. When I got back to Jack and Agnes’s house that night after our meeting at Gail’s, all the lights were off on their side of the house. But my cousin Philip, Jack and Agnes’s son, lived on the other side with his wife, Carolyn, and they were still up. Philip was the person I needed to talk to.
Philip Verhalen was a retired navy officer and pilot. He was also a popular chemistry teacher at a nearby college. Most important for me, Philip was a Boy Scout troop master. Would the scouts be willing to help us clean up Love Cemetery, I asked? Philip said he would check with them at their next meeting. Some days later, they sent their answer: yes. There was no merit badge for a service activity like cleaning up a cemetery, but they wanted to help anyway. We set the date for our first cleanup on a Saturday in July, one week before Nuthel’s eightieth birthday. Perfect. I surprised her with the scouts’ offer of help and she was delighted.
There was just one hitch: we still didn’t have the combination for the gates.
We’d been lucky back in March, when the fence was down and we drove around the first gate. The second gate being left ajar was a fluke. But in Texas, the land belongs to the dead; descendants have a right of access to their deceased family members, regardless of how much private property they have to cross. An attorney assured us that we had the law on our side. Even so, this time we would have scouts and the larger descendant community with us for the cleanup, along with all the volunteers. The owners of the surrounding property needed to know what we were up to. And we needed the numbers for their locks.
No matter what Texas cemetery law says, no matter what rights are accorded to the families of the dead, the descendants of Ohio Taylor, Lizzie Sparks, and the others had been locked out of Love Cemetery for roughly forty years. As I worked to track down the combinations to the locks that currently blocked their entry, I discovered that there was no simple explanation for why they had been barred from Love for so long.
To unravel the mystery, one had to understand the past. Subtract 40 years from 2003 and the year is 1963—which meant that the descendant community got locked out during the civil rights era, a particularly volatile, tumultuous period in Marshall, the Harrison County seat. The magnitude of racism in Harrison County had been well known, and a committed civil rights community had risen up in response.
There were actually two historically black colleges in Marshall in the 1960s: Wiley College, as noted, and Bishop College, founded 1881 by the Baptist Home Society. (Bishop later moved to Dallas; Wiley remains in Marshall.) Students at both colleges helped spark the civil rights movement in Texas with their demonstrations and sit-ins.
Born and raised in Marshall, and a Wiley graduate, James Farmer Jr. became one of the principal leaders of the Civil Rights movement, along with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, Dorothy Height, John Lewis, Rev. Ralph Abernathey, and Roy Wilkins, to mention only some of the best known—there were so many. In 1942, Farmer was one of the founders of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), one of the country’s most important civil rights organizations, in Chicago. He also helped organize the Freedom Rides of the 1960s. In him, the Marshall students, especially those from Wiley, had a towering home-grown example of someone powerfully committed to justice and freedom.
Both Wiley and Bishop students demonstrated in the 1960s at the Harrison County courthouse. Their attempts to integrate Woolworth’s and the local movie theater became legendary as they persisted despite a storm of open hostility. The entire nation was shocked to see photographs splashed across the front pages of drenched students blasted by fire hoses and threatened by dogs.8 The situation was so explosive that when Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. came to Marshall to address the students at Bishop College and Wiley, he did so under the cover of darkness and quietly slipped out of town before the white community even knew he’d been there.
I was tempted to write off the lockout as an outgrowth of the rampant racism of those days and to think no more about it. But there was only circumstantial evidence to support that conclusion. Neither Nuthel nor Doris could give me a specific date or year for the start of the lockout. Neither one lived here at the time.
Certainly no event has a single cause; events take place within a context, and causation is dynamic and complex. In truth, it could have been a land sale that set off the lockout. As I looked more deeply into the rights of the Love Cemetery families and the rights of those who owned the surrounding land, I found a Byzantine tangle of laws that was as unruly and persistent as wisteria: private property laws, easement allowances, Texas cemetery law, U.S. corporate law. To interpret these laws and apply them to Love Cemetery, one relied on antiquated county records that required special training to use and were sometimes incomplete or conflicting.
The process was made more complex still by the increasingly rapid turnover of East Texas timber properties, a trend that had started some years ago and would soon swell into the largest sale of privately held forests in the United States—nine million acres across the nation in 2006.
In 1907, Professor Herman Haupt Chapman from Yale’s School of Forestry took the train to East Texas with several students to investigate virgin longleaf pine forests and evaluate the forests’ marketing potential for the timber industry. He found that the vast standing forests of pines and hardwoods in East Texas were extremely valuable, especially the pines—longleafs and loblollies. Some of the preferred longleaf pines were 350 and 400 years old. With the abundance of rivers and navigable waterways and the expansion of the train system, there were few limits on getting logs to market. The commercial timber industry was already in full swing. Those 350-year-old pines had a girth of fifteen feet. Today it would be hard to find a sawmill in East Texas that could take a tree over fifteen inches in diameter.
Soon the longleafs were gone. The loblolly, prized for rapid growth, quickly took over, and dominates the landscape to this day. The wildness was gone from the land. Its forests were compromised and, with them, the habitats they had provided. Jaguars, panthers, black bears, red wolves, black wolves, honeybees, the ivory-billed woodpecker, and even bright yellow, red, and green parakeets, all once native to East Texas, then disappeared.9
Nearly a hundred years later, here, about seven miles east of Marshall, the Scottsville-Leigh area that surrounds Love Cemetery was increasingly riddled with clear-cuts, burn-offs, and rows and rows of obedient, genetically manipulated loblollies. I was told by a man near Love that periodically there was a process for the “releasing of the pines,” which he found amazing. “The releasing of the pines” was an aerial spraying of pesticides that was meant to kill everything but the pines. The fact that his property adjoined what was, at the time, one of the nation’s largest paper company’s tree farm was no problem to him, for they “released the pines” only when the wind wasn’t blowing.
I discovered that the same multinational paper company started selling off 1.5 million acres of East Texas woodlands in 2001. The land was sold to other timber interests, independent operators, and real estate developers. In 2006, another 900,000 acres of East Texas woods were sold to private interests. Decisions made in corporate headquarters—in Boston, Singapore, Dubai, the Bahamas—and decisions made by the Texas State Legislature in Austin not only generally ignored the impact of sales on wildlife habitats, the carrying capacity of the land, or the state of the soil and water that sustained its use—the environment itself—but they trumped the right of Love Cemetery descendants to have access to ancestors buried on a 1.6-acre plot that had been established, marked, legally deeded, registered, and recorded at the courthouse since 1904.
Nuthel had given me the name and phone number of an agent at a timber management company in Shreveport. The timber management company handled the property for the owner, John Hancock Insurance in Boston. At that time, their holdings didn’t include Love Cemetery itself, but they did include some of the thousands of acres of land along the road leading to the cemetery. Nuthel had dealt with this agent years earlier, when she and her sons had gotten a permanent easement through the property that surrounded Love Cemetery. The timber manager had been agreeable and helpful, respectful and easy to work with. Then he was gone. A year went by with no return phone call; then she asked me to help.
I phoned the company, and my call was returned within twenty-four hours. Now the land was handled by a different timber manager from an entirely different company. Another multinational company was unloading its timber stock. This manager too was a cooperative and helpful man. He immediately gave me the combination and faxed a map detail to me showing that the cemetery had been held out of the sale because it had been properly designated on their maps. Later, when I met him in person, he gave me deeper insight into the complexity of the situation surrounding Love Cemetery.
It was one thing to have an easement on the road to the cemetery, he explained, but it was another matter to track down the property owners whose land the road crosses. As parcels changed hands in greater numbers and with greater frequency, the land was being divided into smaller pieces. And as time went on, fewer and fewer people from the community knew that the cemetery was there. Older folks who still knew where Love Cemetery was, like Nuthel, couldn’t physically get back there. You needed a pickup. And even with a pickup, depending on the weather, you still risked getting stuck in that infamous red East Texas mud. I began to see how this lockout might have evolved over time.
A lot of owners and managers might not want to bother with the claims of a few community members, he said. By himself, he managed tens of thousands of acres in two states and had to deal with hundreds of easements. It simply wasn’t practical, he suggested, to devote close personal attention to each of them.
The timber manager also helped me track down the man who now owned the land immediately surrounding the cemetery. He was from out of state. He’d turned the land into a private hunting preserve, and he was the one, ultimately, who had put Love Cemetery behind the new, second, locked gate.
I called the owner and congratulated him on having such a historic cemetery on his property. I explained that the local Historical Society, the Boy Scouts, the families of the people buried in Love Cemetery, various friends and volunteers, my cousin, and I were excited to have assembled a group to clean it up. I put all my cards on the table: I told him that I was writing a story about our cleanup efforts, and I let it be known that I was familiar with Texas cemetery law and the right of access for family members. But before I was able to muster much indignation, he disarmed me by saying that he’d always known that someone would come back to tend to that cemetery. He said that the cemetery was the prettiest place on the property when the wisteria bloomed. And he was happy to give me the combination to his gate’s lock.
He did express one concern about our visit: he had stocked the reserve with elk and deer. He’d raised the elk himself and gotten pretty attached; even with the hefty price he was able to charge to kill an elk, he found it difficult to let them go.
“Just don’t let my elk out,” he asked. “We’d never catch them.” I assured him that we wouldn’t.