JACKSON COUNTY, GENEALOGY
ENDANGERED!!!
This cemetery is called the Allen Cemetery by some and the Charles Cemetery by others.
The first indication that we were near the cemetery was a thick evergreen ground cover. The plant is named Vinca Minor and also called creeping myrtle, periwinkle, and sometimes cemetery grass. We knew it would be there because Lottie Summers, great-granddaughter of Isom Allen remembers, when she was a child in the 1920's, the family would load a wagon with tools and a packed lunch and go over to the cemetery to clean off the graves. She remembers helping plant the ground cover that chokes out weeds and produces blue flowers in the Spring. It has survived 80 or more years there and, according to Mr. Cooper,"the deer won't even eat it."
There, in the woods, it is dark and damp but so unbelievably peaceful and quiet. You get a sense of those who came before, those buried there and the others who came to care for their graves. This expresses our feelings:
Gordon Anderson Bryan
James T. Williams
Mary J. (Roberts) Allen
At the end of they day we were tired, wet, bleeding from wounds caused by briars and barbed wire, but so satisfied to have "walked back in time" to where our ancestors had stood.
Many thanks to everyone who helped us, especially Mary and Vince Cooper.
We set out on June 25, 2002 to find an old cemetery in Jackson County, Georgia, that was used by the Isom Allen-Doleska Cooley family during the 1800's. It was a rainy, humid day not best suited to tramping through the woods. We spent the first part of the day in the area along Lewis Roberts Rd. between Highway 11 and Jackson Trail asking people if they knew of the cemetery. We finally found someone who had heard of it and contacted Mary Cooper who, along with her husband, Vince and a young man whose name we did not get, helped us. These kind people led us to a spot off Otis Gooch Rd. and spent hours with us searching in the densest woods until we found the cemetery.
The name and date are chiseled out on polished, marbled stone
It reaches out to all who care, it is too late to mourn.
You did not know that I exist, you died an I was born.
Yet each of us are cells of you, in flesh and blood and bone,
Our blood contracts and beats a pulse entirely not our own
Dear Ancestor, the place you filled one hundred years ago
Spreads out among the ones you left who would have loved you so.
I wonder if you lived and loved, I wonder if you knew
That someday I would find this spot and come to visit you.
--Author unknown 
There are many indentions and fieldstones that let us know this was once a large cemetery. There are four graves in a row built above the ground with stones but the slabs that once covered them are gone and any indentifying inscriptions long since lost. Only three graves have readable markers. They are these:
son of I.R. and M.J. Bryan
July 15, 1891 - June 30, 1893
1879 - 1899
"Remember friend as you pass by
That all mankind was born to die.
Then let your cares on Christ be cast,
That you may dwell with Him at last."
wife of W. T. Allen
May 21, 1862 - July 24, 1899
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JACKSON COUNTY, GENEALOGY NOTICE:
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written consent of the file contributor. This file was contributed for use in the
Jackson County, Genealogy Web site by: Paulette Allen Moon (Paulettemoon@msn.com), Treda Ann
Allen Hall (AHall23344@aol.com) and Jason Moon.
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