Scott County, Tennessee
Riverview Cemetery at Smokey Creek

This cemetery was inventoried and transcribed by Theresa McCoy and Felicia Bunn on 12 Sep 2005.

Cemetery was re-inventoried and photographed on 31 May 2011 by Sue Posey and Timothy N. West.

At Smokey Junction, on a small knoll overlooking New River, is the Riverview Cemetery — the foremost burial ground of what is likely Scott County’s oldest settlement.

Long before the railroad came through in the early 20th century and this fertile bottomland area where Smokey Creek empties into New River came to be known as Smokey Junction, folks were settling here and farming those stream banks. It started with Mikel “Grand Mikey” Low — perhaps Scott County’s first permanent white settler, who migrated here and settled on Smokey Creek sometime in the early 1800s — and grew from there.

There are a number of small burial grounds up and down Smokey Creek, and some larger cemeteries, as well. But at the junction, which would grow to become the hub of this settlement, the need for a community cemetery gave rise to Riverview.

If the cemetery had a name in the early days, it has been forgotten by time. But it came to be known as Riverview Cemetery — same name as the church that was later established there.

Riverview Baptist Church was established in 1909. It was the second of two churches at Smokey Junction. The other was Corinth Baptist Church, which had been established in 1887 at nearby Shoal Creek and later moved to the junction at about the same time Riverview Baptist Church was being founded.

According to Janet Lowe, the daughter of Enmon and Janis Owens (more on the Owens family and their ties to this story later), the Riverview Baptist Church meeting house was located in the cemetery until 1968, when it moved to its current location, a former school house on the hill directly across the road from Hembree’s Store, a short distance from the cemetery.

Meanwhile, services continued at the Corinth Baptist Church, which was located at the entrance to the cemetery, according to Lowe, until 1987. At that point, the church disbanded.

But burials at the Riverview Cemetery far predated the building of church houses there. And that’s where the story of this burial ground begins.

Beginnings

With more than 300 graves, Riverview Cemetery is one of the larger cemeteries in Scott County. It has far fewer graves than the three biggest cemeteries — Hazel Valley, Black Creek Crossroads and Carson Memorial — but it has more than nearby Smokey Creek Cemetery, making it the largest cemetery in this part of the county.

The cemetery is still active today. As such, it has a unique mixture of graves marked by commercial headstones, many of them elaborate, and older graves that are marked by simple field stones.

Unfortunately, most of those field stones have been rendered illegible by time, or they were never inscribed to begin with. There are dozens of them, and so it is impossible to know everyone who is buried at Riverview, or exactly how far back the cemetery dates.

What is known is that the first verifiable grave came in 1834. There is a field stone in the center of the cemetery — among the many illegible or uninscribed stones — that simply contains the initials “B.K.P.” and the date “1834.”

Was this the first burial at Riverview? As likely as not, the answer is no. There are simply too many graves marked by uninscribed field stones to believe that at least a few of them didn’t predate the September 1838 burial. But absent additional evidence, the historical record of Riverview Cemetery can only be dated to 1834.

There were four early burials that can be confirmed: “B.K.P.” in 1834, “J.P.” in September 1838, “J.P.” in September 1838, Gabriel Patterson in December 1838, and “S.P.” in September 1844. That was followed by the burial of “M.K.” in 1851.

After that, there wasn’t another confirmed burial at the cemetery until August 1870, when an “L.S.” was buried there. A month later, Sarahan Cross was buried there. Burials began to increase in frequency after that.

The Patterson family

The first verifiable grave at Riverview is Gabriel Patterson, who died Sept. 27, 1838, at the age of 24.

It’s very likely that the graves near his that are inscribed “J.P.” (Sept. 18, 1838) and “S.P.” (Sept. 27, 1844) are his parents, John Robert Patterson and Sallie Keith Patterson.

The Patterson family originally settled further up New River, in what would later become known as the Rosedale area of Anderson County. In fact, the Patterson clan is still very prominent in that part of Anderson County today. There are several Patterson cemeteries along the S.R. 116 corridor in the mountains of Anderson County, and Gabriel Patterson’s grandfather — William Patterson — is buried in one of them, not far from Rosedale School. Several other members of Gabriel Patterson’s family are buried there, as well.

William Patterson was a Revolutionary War veteran who settled first in Hawkins County, then moved to Anderson County. His war pension application contains a wealth of information about his service during America’s fight for independence from Great Britain.

William Patterson and his wife, Nancy English (who is also buried at Patterson Cemetery at Rosedale), had up to 12 children. John Robert Patterson may have been the oldest of them; he may have been born as early as 1776.

The 1830 census lists John Patterson in Anderson County. Prior to the formation of Scott County in 1849, the Smokey area would have been a part of Anderson County. There were nine other persons listed in that census as a part of his household, including eight under the age of 20 and three of them under the age of five. Based on that, it would not be an unreasonable assumption that John Patterson was born later than 1776 — though, absent documentation of some sort, there’s no way to know for sure.

There are several questions that these early burials at Riverview leave us with: How did John Patterson and his family wind up at Smokey, several miles away from the rest of the family? Did they live in the vicinity of what would become Riverview Cemetery (which seems likely)? And what did John Patterson and his son, Gabriel, die of, just nine days apart?

While the proximity of the stones and the little available documentation allow for a reasonable conclusion that the graves “J.P.” and “S.P.” at Riverview are John and Sallie Patterson, there is unfortunately not a lot of additional information about the family. The 1830 census indicates that John and Sallie may have had as many as eight children, but what became of them?

Patterson family research indicates that Gabriel Patterson married Elizabeth Finley, and that they had one child: Jeremiah Monroe Patterson. Elizabeth remarried after her husband’s death, and the family moved from Smokey to North Carolina.

The only other of John and Sallie Patterson’s children that can be traced is Sally Patterson. She married Absalom Johnson “A.J.” Cross in 1856, and died in 1888. While they’re both buried at Massey Cemetery, A.J.’s parents — Absalom Abraham Cross and Mary Cross — may both be buried at Riverview Cemetery.

Given the fact that Riverview Cemetery apparently started as a Patterson family cemetery, it’s reasonable to also assume that “B.K.P.,” who died in 1834, was also a member of the Patterson family. But who? Perhaps another of John and Sallie’s children? If so, the answer might be Billy Patterson, a child of John and Sallie who was born in 1795.

The Cross family

The next verifiable grave at Riverview is that of Sarahan Cross, who died Sept. 14, 1870. (Mary Queener Cross, the wife of Absalom Abraham Cross, died in 1872 and is said to be buried at Riverview, but a stone cannot be found to verify that information.) It isn’t clear who Sarahan Cross was, and the flat stone is very difficult to decipher. Could it have been Sarah Ann Cross? She may have been a member of Absalom Cross’s family, and perhaps of Sally Patterson Cross’s family, which would possibly make her a descendant of John and Sallie Patterson.

There are two graves at Riverview that remain a mystery. One is hand-carved with the initials “M.K.,” the date “1851” and also “DC AG 23.” The other, “W.K.,” was listed in Robert Bailey’s 1994 book “Cemeteries of Scott County, Tennessee” as dying in 1883. However, that stone can no longer be located.

The next grave is that of Margarett “Peggy” Massengale Cross, the wife of William Alexander Cross, who died on Dec. 12, 1886. It is the oldest commercial stone at Riverview Cemetery. She was the daughter-in-law of Absalom Abraham Cross, so as recently as 1886, the only burials at Riverview Cemetery were apparently those of the Patterson and Cross families.

William Alexander Cross was also buried at Riverview when he died in 1919, and several of his and Peggy’s children are also buried there, including Jake Queener Cross (his middle name was his grandmother’s maiden name), Joe Cross, Ab Cross, Andy Cross and Mary Jane Cross Anderson.

Many of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren are also buried at Riverview.

Mary Jane Cross married George B. Anderson, from another family that lived nearby. His parents, Phillip Anderson and Nancy Tackett Anderson, are both buried at Riverview, as are he and his brother, John Thomas “Tom” Anderson.

The grave of two-year-old Luverna Tackett, who was the daughter of Nancy Tackett Anderson’s nephew, can also be found at Riverview Cemetery. Luverna was the great-granddaughter of William and Peggy Cross. His granddaughter, Elizabeth (daughter of Joe Cross) married into the Tackett family, which lived at nearby Clinchmore.

Several other members of the Anderson family were buried at Riverview in the 1890s.

A community cemetery

By the early 1900s, Riverview Cemetery was expanding, and transforming from a family cemetery to a community cemetery. Clinchmore Baptist Church moved to the entrance to the cemetery around 1908 or 1909, and Riverview Baptist Church was established with a meeting house just a stone’s throw away from the cemetery in 1909. The railroad would arrive at about the same time, as the Tennessee Railroad was being built up New River into Anderson County.

At one point, the cemetery came to be known as the “Enmon and Kizzie Lowe Owens Memorial Cemetery,” in honor of the couple who owned the property in latter years. It was Enmon and Kizzie who donated the two-story building at the cemetery that housed Corinth Baptist Church for many years. The ground floor served as the church’s sanctuary, while the upper floor was used by the Junior Order of the United American Mechanics, as well as a work room for the ladies of the church, who made mattresses and quilts during World War II.

Kizzie Lowe was a great-great-granddaughter of Mikel Low, the first white settler in the Smokey area. Her parents were Ewell Lowe and Melvina Cross Lowe (her grandparents were Alex and Almira Massingale Low, and her great-grandparents were Phillip Low Sr. and Sarah Carroll Low).

Melvina Cross, Kizzie Lowe’s mother, was another member of the Cross family that was prominent in the Smokey area during the early days of Riverview. She was the daughter of Joe Cross, granddaughter of William Alexander Cross, and a sister to Elizabeth Cross Tackett.

Enmon Owens, meanwhile, was originally from Jellico Creek, the son of Joseph F. Owens and Mary Chambers Owens. He was a descendent of the Adkins family that was prominent in that area.

Enmon and Kizzie were married in 1917, and joined the Corinth Baptist Church in 1932. Enmon would later serve as a deacon of the church.

At one point, a monument was placed at the cemetery denoting it the “Enmon and Kizzie Owens Memorial Cemetery.” However, it has since been removed.

Of course, Enmon and Kizzie Owens are both buried at the cemetery. So, too, is Enmon’s brother, Dilmon Owens Sr., his wife, Talitha Lowe Owens, and several of their children: Hobert Owens, Dilmon Owens Jr., Alma Owens Shoopman, Meredith Owens, Clifton Owens, and Thelma Owens Mason.

One of the more recent burials at the cemetery is Janis Mason Owens, the wife of Dilmon Owens’ son, Odis. She was a longtime member of the Corinth Baptist Church, and worked as secretary at Scott High School in the 1990s after a lengthy tenure as a substitute teacher in the county school system.

Other notes

On Feb. 3, 2022, Carlus Shoopman Jr. died at the age of 73, and was buried at Riverview. His grave is located in a line of his family members, and his stone reads: “The last family member.”

He was the son of Carlus Shoopman and Alma Owens Shoopman, a great-nephew of Enmon and Kizzie Owens. He is buried next to his mother and two sisters, Mary Lou Shoopman and Donna Lee Shoopman, who died at the ages of 23 and 36. All four have matching headstones.

The Shoopman family was once a prominent family in the Smokey Creek area. They are descended from John Shoopman, who moved from Virginia to Smokey Creek in the early 1800s. Several of the family members are buried at a family cemetery further up the creek. There is also another line of Shoopman graves at Riverview Cemetery. They are the children of Hurstle Shoopman and Ivalee Carroll Shoopman. Their mother is also buried at the cemetery. Hurstle Shoopman was a brother of Carlus Shoopman Sr.

Perhaps the most unique headstone at the cemetery is that of 14-year-old Comodore Perry Adkins, who died on Dec. 11, 1916, less than one month shy of his 15th birthday.

Comodore’s headstone is a tree trunk, with a lamb at its base and a scroll containing his information. For its time — when many graves in rural areas were still being marked with simple field stones — the headstone would have been considered especially elaborate.

Comodore was the son of Levi and Sarah Adkins. His parents and grandfather are also buried at Riverview. (Source: The Independent Herald, 9 Mar 2023, p22-27)