Tour to explore life and death on the frontier

    Phillips County Historical Society will be hosting a tour of the county’s historic burial sites Saturday, Sept. 22, treasurer Carol Haynes said.
    The tour will start at 9 a.m. from the Phillips County Museum. The society plans to tour the Jarvis, Posegate, Amherst, Dunkard, Holyoke, Haxtun, Paoli, Pleasant Valley and Fairfield cemeteries. They may also tour Bryant Cemetery, if they can find a guide to the site, which is now farmed over.
    Although local graveyards may not sound like the most upbeat subject for a tour, Haynes said the society will use the stops on the tour as windows into the region’s storied past.
    “A lot of people haven’t ever been to these places,” she said. She added that the tour will help spread the word about cemeteries whose origins are fading into history.
    Some of the stops on the tour are not well known in Phillips County and are in danger of becoming obscure. Others are well-established and frequently used by local communities.
    
Jarvis Cemetery
    Jarvis Cemetery has been an active burial site since at least the 1880s, with the most recent interment happening less than a year ago.
    Located about 10 miles south of Paoli, Jarvis has been in existence since the earliest days of Phillips County. The land was first offered by a Mr. Jarvis to an unknown settler. Today, families buried in the cemetery include Eckman, Love, Hamilton and Donnelly.
    In the early days of the cemetery, one child was reburied according to a Scottish tradition, where, if a child preceded a mother in death without establishing a home, the body would be reburied in the arms of the mother when the mother died.
    In 1888, Gracie Hamilton became the first member of the Hamilton family to be buried in Jarvis Cemetery. When Gracie’s mother, Catherine, died 30 years later, Gracie’s coffin was exhumed and placed on top of Catherine’s.
    The cemetery was given formal attention and care when the West Phillips County Cemetery District was founded in 1951. The funds for cemetery upkeep were earned by a small tax levy, and the cemetery was incorporated into the district.
    Improvements to the cemetery included a small bronze name marker and, eventually, a barbed wire fence with cedar poles.
    Today, the fence is mostly intact, and the handful of graves are clearly visible.
    
Posegate Cemetery
    Posegate Cemetery is located a few miles south of Paoli. The land was dedicated as a cemetery by Isaac Posegate, a farmer and early settler, in April 1895, and the Posegate Cemetery Association was founded Feb. 5, 1908. At that time, it cost $2 to dig a grave.
    Posegate gave his property to Phillips County following his death, and funded the construction of a high school dormitory, which students lived in during the week because there were no running buses.
    The site is clearly marked today, and contains a few dozen graves, with at least one stone dating back to the 1890s.
    
Bryant Cemetery
    About 11 miles south of Haxtun, near the site of the former town of Bryant, is the Bryant Cemetery.
    The original cemetery site measured 200 feet by 35 feet. In “Those Were the Days,” Phillips County Historical Society’s 1988 book on county history, the site was said to be poorly maintained, but three markers stood in memory of Henry W. Coats, 1900-1901, Edward Davis, 1875-1890, and Absalom Phelps, a veteran of the Civil War who served in the 48th Kentucky Infantry. Bryant has also been called the Lone Soldier Cemetery, in honor of Phelps.
    The town of Bryant declined in the late 1890s, after a railroad line that was planned to run from Holyoke to Akron was abandoned.
    Today, it appears the site has been completely farmed over, and all of the markers are gone. No sign of the graveyard is visible from the intersection of County Roads 3 and 6.

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