The following was reported in the Eufaula Tribune, Sunday July 9, 2000. It was written by Ann S. Smith, Tribune associate editor. Due to length of the article, I will present it in two or three installations. ================================================= "Cemeteries tell of famous and forgotten" Some are marked by small, humble piles of field stones. Others have simple boards of heart pine, the only decoration being a small circle design cut into the top of the small board. Others are mere sunken places in the ground. They are the graves of pioneers, settlers, farmers and slaves who toiled in the hot summer sun and endured winter in crude cabins or, later, sturdier farm houses. Barbour County is filled with hundreds of graves that yield no clues about the lives of the people who were buried in family plots and early rural church cemeteries that do bear witness to the early settlers. Some have wrought iron fences around plots of the more well-to-do families. They are in areas of the county that are today remote, but where communities of several hundred people once lived. In some of the cemeteries, later generations have placed markers. On a hot June afternoon, local history buff Margaret Clayton Russell stands in the midst of a section of Mt. Serene Cemetery, in a wooded area off the Clayton Highway. The straight pine boards on some of the unmarked graves offer mute testimony to the lives of "simple farmers" who, Russell laments, "lived, died and are forgotten." Descendants have fenced in and marked some of the graves at Mt. Serene, where the markers placed in modern times on graves of pioneers John and Anna L. Stewart tell us they were born in 1770 and 1777. But Russell says dozens of unmarked graves are scattered throughout the nearby woods. Beauchamp Cemetery ================= Traveling on down to the old White Oak area, where a depot once stood to accommodate rail traffic, Russell says we will have to climb up a "little bank" to find the family burial ground of one of Barbour County's true pioneers, Green Beauchamp. Along the way, abandoned sharecropper houses are lonely reminders of those who didn't live in grand plantation houses or mansions in Eufaula and Clayton. Beauchamp, whose Chronicles offer a glimpse into pioneer days in Barbour County, came into the frontier about 1818, from Ft. Gaines, GA., Russell informs her companion on the "cemetery field trip." Suddenly she slows down on the isolated dirt road, where carelessly discarded beer cans are the only sign of civilization. She backs up, pulling to the side of the road. After climbing up the embankment and walking a few yards into the woods, she finds the small Beauchamp family cemetery, where it appears the few marble markers have recently been disturbed. "We need to do something about this," she comments, pointing out gravesite of William R. Beauchamp, brother of Green Beauchamp. "He and his wife had seven or eight children who were raised by Green Beauchamp and his wife after their parents died." she says. The cemetery markers document the short lives of many before the days of modern medicine: William R. Beauchamp, who died at age 18, and Asbury Beauchamp, who lived only eight years. "Marie Godfrey searched for years for Green Beauchamp's grave, but she never was sure which one it was," Russell says. But pointing to a crude semi-circle of stones around a sunken area about the size of a casket, she says she believes that is the final resting place of the early pioneer who was only 17 years old when he came to the Creek country in 1818. Russell says Green Beauchamp was probably the last person buried in the old cemetery. In "Backtracking in Barbour County." Anne Kendrick Walker writes that after Beauchamp's death, (1883) his wife, Caroline, who had no children, left the settlement =========================================================== Richard Price SOS 6-3