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Townsend Cemetery Clean Up
December 17, 2004
Jennie Jones Giles
Times-News Staff Writer
[email protected]
The Townsend Cemetery off Mills Gap Road is the next endangered cemetery scheduled for a cleanup by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Walter Bryson Camp.
The cleanup will begin at 10 a.m. Saturday, rain or shine.
All residents interested in the preservation of the country's cemeteries are invited to help, along with descendants of family members buried in the cemetery. Volunteers should meet at the Owenby Fruit Stand at the corner of U.S. 64 East and Mills Gap Road, where a car pool will be organized to go to the cemetery site.
Volunteers will need to bring work gloves, pruners, clippers and rakes, etc.
The cemetery contains the graves of Asa Edney and his wife, Sarah Mills Edney, daughter of William Mills. The Edney and Mills families entered Henderson County in the late 1700s and early 1800s and were prominent early leaders in the county.
Other Edney family members are buried in the cemetery.
Because the Asa Edney family was known to have slaves, it is likely their graves are also in or near the cemetery.
The cemetery is so badly overgrown, surrounded by an almost impassable thicket of briars and brush, that it is impossible to determine the exact number of graves or who is buried there.
In addition to the Edneys' graves, located graves include those of Buckanon Featherstone, son of one of the first settlers into Henderson County, and J.J. Nix, who served in Company D, Confederate States of America.
The graves of Isaac W. Conner, 1849-July 16, 1916, and Foot Conner, who drowned in the 1916 flood, are also known to be in the cemetery.
In 1992, at least 50 graves could be seen. There may be many more. The area is so badly overgrown the exact dimensions of the site could not be determined. It was conservatively measured at 45 feet by 72 feet. It is a deeded cemetery, said Norman Miller with the Sons of Confederate Veterans. He is trying to locate the deed to determine the exact dimensions.
Family genealogists and local residents say ancestors of the Townsend family and local Clark family are likely also buried in this cemetery.
For more information, call 698-5587, 674-6996 or 692-7385; e-mail [email protected]
or [email protected];
or visit www.geocities.com/norman_leroy_miller.