A wooded hill just above Amnicola Highway near Highway 153 may appear from a distance to be barren of human contact, but looks can sometimes be deceiving.
At the top is a real historical treasure – the Kingspoint Cemetery.
The cemetery has not had any burials since the early decades of the 20th century, and since 1938 has been owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Yet it is still as full of history as it is of overgrown bushes and vines.
According to some information at the library, the cemetery was opened in 1830. It was originally called the Sivley Cemetery. Another Sivley Cemetery also exists in Mountain Creek across from the former Mountain Creek Elementary at the bottom of the W Road.
One of the more interesting aspects of the Kingspoint/Sivley Cemetery is that several members of the Woodward family are buried there. They are remembered in local historical annals not for who they were, but for what happened to them. They all died on Feb. 24, 1897, in one of the worst tragedies ever to strike a family in the Scenic City.
The incident occurred while the family was living in the Jersey Pike area. One of the daughters was scheduled to move to Florence, Ala., where her husband had found work. Before she did, however, the mother, Mrs. W.J. Woodward, wanted to get a family picture made in downtown Chattanooga.
They had set out in their wagon that morning, lunched with friends in East Chattanooga (Sherman Heights) and then proceeded toward town along Harrison Pike. At a point where the road crossed the tracks (near North Orchard Knob Avenue), a Southern Railway passenger train traveling from Atlanta to Chattanooga hit them. Killed were all but one of the 10 family members in the wagon.
Seven died instantly and two of the girls died later in the hospital. The lone survivor was three-year-old Vergie Woodward, who was found on the train engine. The family members were reportedly thrown as high as the telegraph poles.
Eyewitnesses claimed that the train had sounded its siren in advance, but that the 24-year-old wagon driver, George Woodward, did not heed the warning.
The family members were buried there following a service at the nearby Kingspoint Baptist Church.
Former Criminal Court Judge Charles Lusk, who made a documentation of some local cemeteries as part of his hobby of exploring out-of-the-way places, made reference to the wreck in his history of area cemeteries. He had visited the cemetery in 1941 and remarked then that it was already overgrown.
I visited the cemetery for the first time in early March of this year at the invitation of my cousin, Jim Smith from Chickamauga, Ga. I found the cemetery as overgrown as Judge Lusk had found it 60 years earlier. Even for late winter, it was covered pretty well.
But it still seemed to have a haunting beauty. The tombstones were as interesting to read as a good novel, and daffodils and periwinkle were blooming quite brightly, even though few humans had opportunities to enjoy them.
The cemetery was reached from Amnicola Highway by way of an approximately 500-yard walk on a dirt road that was quite overgrown with privet hedges.
Mr. Smith has done some family research and had previously found the grave of my great-great-grandmother, Malissa B. Mathis, who died in 1891. So he invited several other local relatives to see it.
Mr. Smith is the son of Totsy Hale, a longtime Chattanooga piano teacher and player, and brother of Bill Smith, a former principal at several Chattanooga area schools. Mrs. Hale is the granddaughter of Mrs. Mathis.
Mrs. Mathis had been the aunt of former president Andrew Johnson.
I took my parents three weeks later to see the cemetery, and I enjoyed it as much the second time.
Another interesting tidbit about the cemetery comes from a 1979 newspaper article on file at the Chattanooga public library. The story quotes an elderly man, Roy K. Elmore, discussing the legend surrounding a mausoleum at the site.
He claimed to have heard that the husband of the woman placed in the mausoleum evidently felt guilty that he had not provided enough nice clothes for her while she was living. So about every week after her death, he would go to the cemetery, get into the mausoleum and change her clothes.
The mausoleum was later declared a health hazard and her body was buried elsewhere, Mr. Elmore said.
The collapsed mausoleum in the photograph of the 1979 article looks much as it does today.