Scott County, Tennessee
Davis Cemetery at Alderville

This cemetery was inventoried and transcribed by Timothy N. West and Sue Posey on 30 May 2005.

Cemetery was revisited and inventoried by Lee Hamby Gallery on 16 Sep 2008.

When Robert Bailey transcribed the Davis Cemetery on Alderville Road in Winfield in 1994, he noted a broken stone that read, “deseased 10 July 1812.”

That’s noteworthy because in Bailey’s work – he tirelessly visited and inventoried every cemetery in Scott County, publishing his work through the Scott County Historical Society – that gravestone was the oldest verifiable grave he located.

The name on the stone wasn’t decipherable even three decades ago, due to the stone being broken. Fast-forward 29 years, and 29 years of time and weather have rendered the stone completely illegible. Presumably, though, it’s still in the cemetery. There’s no way to know with absolute certainty, but that might very well make Davis Cemetery the oldest cemetery in Scott County. (The oldest grave that can be identified is that of James Trammell, who died in 1826 and is buried at Angel-Wright Cemetery.)

Today, Davis Cemetery is located in the back of a hay pasture along Alderville Road, a short distance from Pleasant Grove Road. Sprawling flatlands that are bisected by streams with Chitwood Mountain standing sentry behind them, this was fertile land even 200 years ago, which is why the earliest settlers of the area that would become Winfield chose to settle here.

There are fewer than three dozen graves in the cemetery. And while the cemetery isn’t as meticulously maintained as many in Scott County, it isn’t altogether inactive, either. The most recent burial there dates to less than a decade ago.

Beginnings

The timeline of the Davis Cemetery is interesting. The broken stone noted by Bailey, dating to 1812, indicates that the cemetery was being used during the days when the very first settlers were arriving in present-day Scott County. But, besides that broken stone, the oldest grave in the cemetery didn’t appear for another 40 years – 1852. Of course, there are several graves in the cemetery that are marked with uninscribed stones, and several unmarked graves, as well. So, it’s possible, if not likely, that burials took place between 1812 and 1852.

In any event, the first grave at Davis Cemetery that can have a name affixed to it is that of 16-year-old Sarah Sharp. She was born on Christmas Eve in 1835 and died on October 21, 1852.

It’s not clear exactly where young Sarah was buried in the cemetery. A massive slab of rock was fashioned into a headstone but later fell and was moved to the base of a tree in a corner of the cemetery. There, it rests against the trunk of the tree along with a similar stone for Ewell Sharp, who died on April 22, 1857, at the age of four months.

Given the almost identical nature of their stones, it’s safe to assume that Sarah and Ewell Sharp were brother and sister. Unfortunately, it isn’t easy to determine much more about their family.

There was a large Sharp family living in the Winfield area at the time. It was with them that the Hines Motel – which stood until it was destroyed by fire in 1980 – originated. The patriarch and matriarch of the family were James L. Sharp and Mary Gibson Sharp, and many of them are buried at the Winfield Cemetery. However, this Sharp family did not arrive in Winfield until later in the 1850s, and census records indicate that Sarah Sharp was not their daughter.

Buried at Davis Cemetery between the deaths of Sarah and Ewell Sharp was Nancy McPeters. She died on October 12, 1856, at the age of 49.

Nancy McPeters was the daughter of Asael and Temperance Deadmond Cross. She married Joseph McPeters, though he was quite a bit earlier than her. Joseph McPeters was one of at least 15 Revolutionary War veterans who later settled in present-day Scott County. His first wife was Elizabeth Russ. Following her death, he married Nancy Cross McPeters in 1833. His burial location is unknown.

The cemetery grows

Christmas 1882 must have been a sad one for the Creekmore family of Winfield. On that Christmas Day, six-year-old Andrew Creekmore died. His burial was the first at Davis Cemetery in a quarter of a century.

Little Andrew was the son of Green Berry (G.B.) and Elizabeth Creekmore. When the 1880 census was taken, the Creekmores had seven children. Andrew was the fifth of them. He had four older brothers, a two-year-old younger sister, and a five-month-old younger brother.

Elizabeth Creekmore was from the Chitwood family that was so prominent in Winfield at the time. She was the daughter of John Henry Chitwood and Nancy Hamby Chitwood. Her great-grandfather was Revolutionary War veteran James Chitwood, the ancestor of most Chitwoods in Scott County today. He moved with his brother to the Winfield area following the war.

John Henry Chitwood was a Union soldier in the Civil War and died while imprisoned at Andersonville in 1864. He and three of his sons were all captured by Confederate forces at the Battle of Rogersville late in the war, and all four of them died while in captivity.

Andrew Creekmore’s mother, Elizabeth, died in Knoxville in 1921. His father, G. B., married Elizabeth Blankenship – a third great-granddaughter of Revolutionary War veteran Dennis Trammell – in 1915 and moved to New Mexico, where he died in 1946.

Andrew Creekmore’s grandmother – Nancy Hamby Chitwood, whose husband and three sons died at Andersonville during the Civil War – was buried at Davis Cemetery when she died in 1887. She was a niece of Nancy McPeters.

The Davis family

On January 3, 1886, 60-year-old Ann Meadors Taylor became the oldest person – at the time – buried at Davis Cemetery. Her grave is also the oldest at the cemetery to be marked by a modern commercial stone, though it was placed by members of her family in recent years.

Taylor was the wife of Dempsey Taylor, who was also buried at Davis Cemetery when he died in 1891.

The Taylors have a son and daughter-in-law, Dennis and Sarepta Elswick Taylor, who were buried inside a small, fenced partition within the cemetery.

Dempsey and Ann Taylor’s daughter, Kizziah Taylor Davis, is also buried at the Davis Cemetery, and it is there that the cemetery takes its name. She married Andrew Davis, who is also buried there. Like her parents, Kizziah and Andrew had a modern commercial stone placed by descendants in recent years. (Andrew and Kizziah had a son, Louie Bryant Davis, who married into the Adkins family of Jellico Creek and is buried at the Adkins Cemetery.)

Redmon Lee Davis, the son of Andrew and Kizziah, was buried at Davis Cemetery when he died in 1937 at the age of 49.

As an interesting sidenote: The Davis Cemetery was known as the Taylor Cemetery before it became known as the Davis Cemetery. (It has also occasionally been referred to as Baker cemetery.)

Meanwhile…

Between the death of Ann Taylor in 1886 and the death of her daughter, Kizziah Davis, in 1906 – long before the cemetery was known as Davis Cemetery – other burials were taking place there.

Among them were three Brown children – Charlie (1887, age two), Vanilla (1891, age five), and Flara (1892, age six months) – who, judging from the similarities of their stones, were likely siblings. Unfortunately, no further information is available about the Brown family. However, a possibility is Harrison and Lucy Stanfill Brown, who lived nearby and had a large family.

Civil War veteran James Marion Trammell Sr. was buried at Davis Cemetery in 1893, when he died at age 65. He was a grandson of Revolutionary War veteran Dennis Trammell. His wife, Rebecca Hamby Trammell, was buried there five years later. Their original stones are leaning against each other in the back corner of the cemetery. Rebecca Trammell was a niece of Nancy McPeters and a sister to Nancy Hamby Chitwood.

The modern era

Following the deaths of the Taylors and Davises between 1906 and 1937, the Davis Cemetery was mostly dormant. Husband and wife Charles William Baker and Ollie Davis Baker, along with their 29-year-old son, Lawrence Edward Baker, were buried there between 1939 and 1951. It would be another 20 years before the next burial, Mitchell Burke, in 1971.

Following the burial of Burke in 1971 and his infant grandson Chad Waylon Blevins in 1973, it was another 25 years before the burial of Betty Phillips Burke in 1998. She was Mitchell Burke’s wife.

Mitchell and Betty Burke’s daughters, Beulah Mae Posey and Eula Faye Blevins, were buried there in 2006 and 2013, respectively. Chad Waylon Blevins was Eula Faye’s son.

The most recent burial at the cemetery was Beulah Mae’s daughter, Judy Smith Duncan, who died in May 2015 at age 59.

Unknowns

Two mostly illegible field stones at the cemetery remain a mystery. Both Bailey in 1994 and Tim West in 2008 transcribed stones that were engraved with the initials “J. C.” and “S. L. C.” though no further information is available about either grave.

However, it has been purported that these are the graves of J. C. Burke and S. L. C. Burke. If so, it’s not entirely clear who they were. Mitchell Burke was the son of William Haden Burke. Neither he nor his father had a sibling with the initials J. C. or S. L. C.

Another stone, listed by West but not by Bailey, was engraved with the initials “F. O. C.”

The most intriguing grave at Davis Cemetery is an above-ground stone box style grave of the sort commonly found in 19th century cemeteries but not too common in Scott County. However, the grave does not contain any epitaph or engravings at all. So, it’s not only impossible to know whose grave it is, but also how old it is. (Source: The Independent Herald, 24 Aug 2023, p24-27)