Mount Pleasant Baptist Church Cemetery isn’t exactly off the beaten track.  It’s right next to the church of the same name, not far from Kingston Pike on Lyon’s View, just down the street from Cherokee Country Club.  You’ve probably driven by it hundreds of times, like I had before I finally decided to stop there one day.  That was a few years ago, before I was blogging my graveyard adventures.  So last weekend I went back.




Some changes have taken place since my last visit here.  At that time a portion of the cemetery was completely overgrown.  And I don’t mean with weeds.  There was a small forest on one side that had grown right up around the graves!  But that’s gone now.  The photo below shows part of the formerly overgrown area.  Some of the part I didn’t photograph has been planted with new grass.

There’s more evidence of sprucing up going on, such as the replacement/repair of the chain link fence around the property:

Of course there is still room for improvement . . .

But I’m not going to complain since the hole in the fence led to another adventure.  If you are familiar with the area you will know what is right next door, behind a high stone wall.  Well, below is a photo of the INSIDE of that wall and  a couple more (quickly snapped) shots of what lies within.



After experiencing that little thrill, I went back to the graveyard and explored some more.  This graveyard is quite old.  Although the plaque on the church above indicates that this new building replaced another built in 1887, other internet resources indicate that the church opened in 1870.  Yet the earliest interments were in 1858.  The majority of the burials took place in the first three decades of the last century.  There are a few as late as the 1970s, but I saw no recent burials.









There were some hand-carved tombstones.


Of course, there were little ones.

One of the interesting things about visiting local cemeteries is the fun of seeing familiar names, and realizing that the roads you’ve traveled your whole life, for example, are named after actual people, people who owned the land once upon a time, and here they are!  But the roads in nearby Sequoyah Hills are not named after the residents of this cemetery.
Mount Pleasant Baptist Church Cemetery is an African-American graveyard, and many of the people buried here were born into slavery and freed by the war.  Their hard work for the most part was not rewarded by having local roads named after them.    I could not find the reference but I seem to recall having read that many of the people buried here worked at what was then known as the insane asylum, just down the road.  This was partly confirmed by a blog post I found while researching the stones below:


I was interested in these stones because of the unusual names, which I also thought would be easier to research because they were uncommon, and also because of Mr. Crump’s military service.  I learned from his great-great-granddaughter’s blog post that Mr. Crump, born the slave of Martha Crump in West Tennessee, fought in the Union Army.  He bought property in Knoxville and raised a family here, with both his son and grandson working as bakers at what we now remember as Lakeshore.  She writes that “Lavon Crump [her grandfather] often repeated to his children the importance of a good family name . . . [when] he retired [after 50 years of service] he brought home a gold stick pin and his parking sign from the Hospital lot, it read: Honorable Lavon Crump. His placement of the sign at the corner of his yard was another expression of his pride.” Her mother, she says, stressed the importance of “[h]ow we transformed a slave brand into a meaningful family name.”
Names are important.  Remembering people is important.  Sometimes a grave marker is the only hard evidence that a person existed.  And that’s one reason I visit graveyards.