Fannin County TXGenWeb
Visit to the Ward & Jolly Cemetery

By Harry S. Hamilton




Marian and Wes Hamilton standing at opposite sides of Yoakum family plot.  This picture provides an indication of how overgrown the cemetery is.  Fannin Co., Texas, April 2001

      Jeremiah (Jerry) Ward was born in South Carolina in 1788 and died at the age 65 in Fannin County, Texas.  During his lifetime, he and his brothers and sisters and their families helped set the pace for America’s expansion across the continent. His family left South Carolina for Kentucky, then for Illinois, then to Missouri, then on to Texas.  Jerry and his brothers lived in a time that America was still fighting
to maintain its freedom and forming itself as a nation.  Jerry and his brothers left America to become Texicans in the Republic of Texas, and became Americans again when that country joined the Union. While Jerry did not live to see the Civil War in which several if his sons would fight and die, we can be sure he saw it coming.

      As with most of America’s pioneers, a crumbling monument is all that is left to remind us of his passing.  And most of us don’t have a clue to its location.

     Jeremiah Jerry WARD ( 27 Jan 1788 – 14 Aug 1853) was my great great great grandfather through my father’s mother’s mother’s father.  In April 2001, my parents, Wes and Marian Hamilton, and I visited Bonham, Allen’s Chapel and Honey Grove looking for the Ward Homestead and the Ward-Jolley Cemetery.  I had tried to find the cemetery a year previously using directions from Cousin Carol Mahony, but had had no luck.  After that visit I met, through the Internet, Billy Rae Suiter, and in the fall of 2000, he and a friend located the cemetery and provided additional directions.  The early part of both directions matched one another very well.  After that, well, let’s just say, there was still some treasure seeking to do.

     The property is a combination of farmland and very thick, cut over woods.  Most of the trees are probably about 25 years old, with some very old trees mixed in.  Some of the fields are still in use.  Others have been left fallow and are now becoming overgrown with bushes and thickets of black locust trees.  The long black thorns of the black locusts make it hard going.  The farmland in use has very dark soil.  After the rains of the day before, it was thick and gooey.  As you can see in the picture of my parents in the cemetery, the woods are thick with vines and saplings. Trees include hickory, hackberry, juniper, and oak.  The two creeks, Ward and Yoakum are in deep gullies, possibly created as a result of the land being cut over.

    Our directions had distances 4 and 8 times longer than they really were.
We stumbled around for about two hours.  We could just feel we were not in the right place, perhaps too far to the west.  We came back east and went further south to try to match the description of the land to the way we saw it.  We hit another tree line and decided to head east again.  This time we straddled the fence, my mother and father walked on one side while I walked the other.
We came to a corner and they jogged left coming onto a new fence.  I slowly veered left trying to keep about the same distance from this new fence.   Simultaneously, we called out to each other that we had found it.  Dad and Mom had walked right onto the cemetery and I had walked onto the Bain cemetery.  Needless to say, we were very excited.

Wes Hamilton stands beside his great great grandfather’s and grandmother’s, Jeremiah and Nancy Ward, monument. Fannin Co., Texas, April 2001

    Jeremiah died on 14 August 1853 and was buried on his property or just barely off it.  The cemetery is on a slight ridge created by two drainages on either side. The woods are thick with a brushy and viney under story, but if the land were cleared it would have a view of a small creek valley looking to the east. The cemetery is badly overgrown.  But there is evidence there were intentions to make the cemetery a restful one with stately trees and monuments.  Black walnuts had been planted and were saved from the logging.  The monuments are large. The graves of the Carters and Nancy Ward were planted over with purple Iris, Dutch Iris, and violets.  The Ward monument, a kind of limestone, has started to decay and has taken on a perilous tilt.  It was erected by the children as evidenced by the inscription, "Our Parents, Lord, Thy will be done,  Nor mine, but thine, O Lord."  It appears the monument was erected after Nancy passed away 25 June 1886. A wood post and barbwire fence had enclosed the cemetery.

    The cemetery contains Jeremiah Nancy, Bell Carter and son Leo, and the Yoakum family; Adam S., his wife Martha, and children, SY, NEY, and AY.
As there are only foot and head stones for the Yoakums, I’ve taken the first names from an early list of Fannin County Cemeteries.   John F. Jolley was supposedly buried here at one time.  When Cousin Carol Mahony visited the location in 1987, she was lead to the cemetery by Mr. Roy Epperson, who has since passed away.  At the time, Roy was 85, and Carol described him as,  "small, very frail looking man, bent over and twisted from arthritis.  He doesn’t look his 85 years of age, though… "  Epperson had written Carol in response to a "letter to the editor" she had written in May to the Honey Grove Signal-Citizen newspaper asking for help in finding the cemetery.  In his letter, he said as boys, they called the cemetery the Ward and Jolly Graveyard.   His oldest brother, Byron, married a girl named Mamie Ward, whose father was Andrew Ward.  This is probably Andrew, the son of A.J. who was killed in the Civil War.  He went on to tell her that Jim Jolley had a grave (he thought Carter) moved to the Windom Cemetery.  Marilyn Allen Kelch, an Allen descendent believes that William A. and Mary Polly Ward are buried in this cemetery as well.  However, we did not find any marker, although we were there only a short time.

   Frustrating verification of any claim of who is buried here by actually finding a stone is that the limestone markers are rapidly decaying.  Any handling at all is hazardous.   When I found the Bain cemetery there were as many headstones flat on the ground and broken as there were standing.  Those on the ground were partly covered over by leaves and other detritus.  I believe that the Yoakum markers were originally in front of a large family marker as there is a square stone pedestal about 10 inches high near them.

     The Bains and McCraw’s, names that appear in the Bain Cemetery arrived in this area north of Honey Grove in 1845.  The Bain Cemetery is about 150 feet slightly north of east of the Ward Monument.

    To find the cemetery, travel 1.2 miles west on county road 2980 off of 1396.  Walk south about a quarter of a mile.  You will intercept a field bounded by a barbed wire fence supported by wooden posts (in April 2001).  The fence runs east and west.  Cross over the fence into the field and walk east to the corner.  At this corner, a new barbed wire fence supported by steel posts runs north.  The old fence on wooden posts continues to run west.  Walk north down the west side of the new fence about 300 feet.  The Ward monument is about 10 feet from the fence underneath a big tree.

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