Chaires or Cates Cemetery

The inscribed tombstone of Raymond Gavin (d.1924) standing in the abandoned cemetery shown on official maps as Cates Cemetery apparently identifies that cemetery also as Chaires Cemetery. That veteran’s burial site is listed as Chaires Cemetery by the 1940-41 veterans’ grave registration (which did not list Cates Cemetery), where the locating directions given fit very well the location of the stone and the mapped position of Cates Cemetery. The site holds fewer than a dozen grave markers, the most recent inscription 1972, but there are many other grave depressions. The ruin of what evidently was a small wire-fence enclosure of graves remains.

Site File 8Wa684 in the Florida Division of Historical Resources concerns this cemetery but, unfortunately, confuses the site with another located 2˝ to 3 miles north-northeast that is listed herein as Kirkland or Mays Cemetery and that shows on maps as Mays Cemetery. The submittal form in the file names the site the Mays Cemetery and gives some data valid for the Kirkland or Mays site. The submitter, Arimentha Harris, says her intent was the old cemetery where her mother Mae Ella Williams’s grave is located; the grave and inscribed stone can be seen in this Chaires or Cates Cemetery. Most of the material in the site file does pertain to this Chaires or Cates site; a survey plat submitted fixes the site of the cemetery in the southwest part of Lot 11, Block B, of Buck Forest Subdivision, and about 75 yards east of the subdivision street Quail Run. The funeral notice for Mrs. Williams in the Tallahassee Democrat in 1972 gives “Kinsley Cemetery.” This Chaires or Cates Cemetery lies in what may well have been a part of the old Kinsey holdings. There is no explanation presently for the site-file submittal’s confusion of this site with the Kirkland or Mays Cemetery.

Information in the site file indicates that the last burial here was that of Mrs. Williams in 1972. There is a loose estimate that the cemetery was established around 1880. No residential development has yet crowded this wooded site, but such development is growing in the subdivision, and approaching.