--photo by Leroy Blair
This cemetery is located on Russell Mountain north of Bald Knob. It was unrecorded until a resident of the area contacted Leroy Blair of the White County Historical Society after reading a Searcy newspaper article about Blair’s search for cemeteries.
Following is Blair’s report: "I visited this old cemetery on April 9, 2001. On the previous day, The Daily Citizen had published an article that I wrote about searching for forgotten cemeteries. A gentleman named Jerry Cummins contacted me and said there was an old Civil War graveyard on Russell Mountain north of Bald Knob. He said he was told about it by his brother. He said there were rocks for markers with names scratched on them.
"Here are the directions he gave me to get to the cemetery: From Bald Knob take Highway 167 north to Russell Mountain Road. Turn right and go to Strawberry Lane. Turn left and go to the first road and turn right. After that I would have to ask people in the area. I stopped at a house and asked a man who was working in the yard. He told me to go see a Mr. Tom Wadley who had lived around there many years – that if there was a cemetery there, he would know about it. I called him on the phone and talked to his wife. She told me there was an old graveyard on their property and for me to come up to their house and she would tell me where it was. I drove to the house and just as I was getting ut of the van, Mr. Wadley drove up. He said he would take me to the graveyard. We got in his truck and drove about a quarter-mile back in the fields.
"I found an area covered with some kind of small bushes with white flowers. They were so thick you could hardly see through them. I did manage to find four sets of grave markers – just rock with nothing on them. Mr. Wadley said that one of the graves was that of a man by the name of Captain Lee, who was the first person to homestead in that part of White County. And another was that of the baby of Ray and Mary Martin, who died around the turn of the century. He did not know who the others were but thought that they might be relatives of Captain Lee. He also said that there were some Indians buried in the cemetery. He said he moved up north for a few years and when he returned he found that someone had tried to dig up one of the Indian graves. He also told me that a man came out there about eight or nine years ago and did some probing in the ground and said he had found 15 graves. Since I did not find any names scratched on the rock markers at this old cemetery, this may not be the one Mr. Cummins told me about."
If you have information about this cemetery, contact the White County Historical Society, P.O. Box 537, Searcy, AR 72145.