Benevolent Society No. 84 Cemetery, Hamilton Church Pike, Antioch

One of my favorite Benevolent cemeteries, and one of the smallest, is Benevolent Society No. 84 on Hamilton Church Pike in southeast Nashville. One reason it is my favorite is pure bias - it is located not far from where I grew up. I also love it because it has an abandoned lodge building on site.

What is likely an abandoned lodge building located on the property of the cemetery.

The cemetery is small, not marked, well maintained, and backs up to a suburban neighborhood. I feel that some graves may actually be located in the back yards of the houses behind the cemetery. The cemetery was a bit overgrown at the rear when I visited it, and it seemed to possibly extend into the neighborhood behind it. There were not very many marked graves (not more than 20), although it is always possible there are unmarked graves at the rear of the cemetery. There is at least one veteran buried here.  Many of the stones dated from the last half of the 20th century.

Tombstone located in an overgrown area at the rear of the cemetery.

Tombstone at the cemetery

Graves at the cemetery.

There are several mentions of the lodge in the Nashville Globe.  It often met with Benevolent Society No. 107 of Una, another small community in southeast Davidson County. For example, that paper noted in August 1909 that the two groups met together at B.O. No. 84 on "Hamilton Hill" (what the community located around what is now Hamilton Church Pike was once called).

From the Nashville Globe, August 27, 1909

I have done a bit of research on the members buried at this cemetery, using the cemetery transcription from findagrave.com. (http://findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gsr&GScid=2300072) I was hoping to see what I could learn about what types of people were members of this lodge.  I learned that Albert Miller (1854-1939) rented a home in the community and worked as a road laborer in 1930. His death certificate, however, lists his occupation as farmer. Mr. Miller was literate and was not a veteran. His wife, Victoria Trimble Miller (1874-1941) was born in Rutherford County.  After his death, Victoria lived at 54 Trimble Street in Nashville.

I also researched Bernettie Whitsey (1875-1968).  Mrs. Whitsey was a laundress in 1930, married to John Whitsey, a farmer. Living with them in their home were two stepdaughters and two grandchildren, ages 6 and 8.  Like the Millers, the Whitseys rented their home. John has been born in Williamson County, and he died in 1943 at the age of 74.

I hope to do more genealogical research of the people buried in the Benevolent cemeteries. It humanizes the group, and it gives me a much better idea of what the members were like.  It also gives me a better sense of the importance of the group to the members.  These members listed here likely did not enjoy great financial prosperity, so a group like the Benevolent Society, which offered sick and death benefits at a time when the government did not, was likely very important to the Whitseys and the Millers. In time, I also hope that I learn about the fate of the lodge, and whether there are any members alive who remember meeting in this building.

Side view of the building. It is a concrete block building with a gable front roof, brick chimney, and several windows.

Interior of the building as it appeared in late 2012.

Supreme Royal Circle of Friends of the World

Back in 2014, while doing fieldwork for Tennessee's Reconstruction Past: A Driving Tour (a project I am very proud to have worked on and very dear to my heart. You can see it here.), I came across another fraternal group in Shelby County.  I was at the Gray's Creek Missionary Baptist Church and Cemetery (a congregation started, incidentally in 1843) when I noticed several tombstones with the "Supreme Royal Circle of Friends of the World" etched on them.  They all also had either chambers or circles noted, much like the Mosaic Templars. The symbology was very interesting at well, a lion over an inverted triangle.

Top of a tombstone showing the Supreme Royal Circle of Friends of the World

I have not had time to research the group extensively, but it appears to have started in Arkansas in 1909, in the town of Helena. According to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture, by 1944, the group had spread and had more than 100,000 members nationwide.  The founder was Dr. Richard Williams, an Arkansas native. Intriguingly, Dr. Williams was educated in Nashville (at Meharry) and practiced medicine in Knoxville before moving to Helena in 1905. Despite his connections to middle and west Tennessee, I have not yet found chapters of the organization in that part of the state.

The group's headquarters later moved to Chicago. They opened two hospitals for the benefit of its members - one in Memphis and one in Little Rock. The hospital is listed in the 1923 Polk directory of Memphis as being located on South Fifth Street. According to Calvin White, Jr. in The Rise to Respectability: Race, Religion and the Church of God in Christ, the hospital failed in 1924 and the property purchased by the Church of God in Christ (COGIC).

Listing for the Royal Circle hospital in Memphis in the 1923 Polk City Directory. Courtesy the Shelby County Archives.

Back to the cemetery at Gray's Creek, a number of circles and chambers are listed. Some of these include the Crescent Circle No. 304 and Eads Circle No. 1045. I would like to find out what other circles and chambers existed in Tennessee.

Symbol for the group

Tombstone showing that the deceased was a member of Eads Circle 1045

To learn more about the group, see its entry in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture.

Benevolent Society cemeteries of Middle Tennessee

Lately I have been thinking about the number of Benevolent Society cemeteries I have observed in Middle Tennessee, and whether there we can look at these cemeteries as evidence to tell us more about the group itself.  My thoughts are still being clarified, so this is something of an exercise in gathering thoughts in a semi-coherent manner.

To begin, I do not believe I have observed all the cemeteries in Middle Tennessee that were established by the Benevolent Society.  I think that, as the group died out in smaller communities, the cemeteries started by the Benevolent Society were given other names.  Also, I think that it is very possible that some cemeteries were surveyed by well-meaning transcriptionists in the past, and a name assigned to the cemetery that the community that established it would not have recognized.  For example, if a cemetery has fallen into apparent disuse, any sign that existed marking the name of the cemetery may have disappeared.  When a well-meaning genealogist then transcribed the names on the visible tombstones, a name, likely reflecting the last name of one of the families buried there, was assigned to the cemetery.  I also think some may have suffered from development, and after wooden grave markers deteriorated, they were overlooked and forgotten on the landscape.

Marker to the Benevolent Society No. 11 in the Benevolent Cemetery in Murfreesboro

Marker to the "B.O" (Benevolent Order, another name for the Benevolent Society), Port Royal

One thing I have found is that several of these cemeteries have a large, ornate marker to the local chapter of the Benevolent Society.  Examples include the Benevolent Cemetery in Murfreesboro, Mount Ararat in Shelbyville (a Benevolent Society cemetery), and the Benevolent Cemetery in Port Royal. Individual grave markers in these cemeteries are not often that ornate, and this leads me to think that while the Benevolent Society as a whole may have enjoyed some financial stability, the individual members did not enjoy the same level of financial resources.

Monument to the Benevolent Society in Mount Ararat Cemetery in Shelbyville. It reads "Sacred to the memory of the honored dead of the Benevolent Society. Their works do follow them. August 1897."

Commemorative marker for the Benevolent Society at Mt. Ararat Cemetery in Nashville. This cemetery was organized by the Benevolent Society and by the Sons of Relief, another fraternal group.

  Something else noticeable in the Benevolent Society cemeteries is that they are physical representations of the segregated landscape African Americans navigated in Tennessee. Some, such as the Mount Ararat Cemetery in Shelbyville and the Benevolent Society Cemetery in Goodlettsville, are located adjacent or across the road from an older, white cemetery. In the case of the cemetery in Goodlettsville, the two cemeteries, Benevolent Society (African American) and Cole Cemetery (white) are adjacent with no fence between. In that case, it is difficult now to know which cemetery is which, but my gut tells me the community was never in doubt of which cemetery was black and which was white.  I think that more should be done to document cemeteries as sites of segregation in Tennessee, and how Jim Crow pursued you even into death.

Mount Ararat (black) Cemetery in Shelbyville in shown in the foreground. The road and the cemetery in the background (surrounded by a fence) is the white Willow Mount Cemetery, established in the 1840s.