News from May 3, 2007 issue

Local News
The Crittenden Press (3 pages) PDF
(Selected pages 1A, 8A, 4B)
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Glore gives new life to old cemetery
Charles Glore never thought too much about the old cemetery down the road from his house although he’d passed it thousands of times.
For the last 34 years, no one else had thought much about it either – or at least that’s the way it appeared until six weeks ago.
Glore, 67, said it was his grand-daughter who convinced him that it was time to refurbish the old Mt. Zion Cemetery near Salem on a rural road that bears its name.
“She said graveyards are God’s gardens,” said Glore. “I figured this garden needed a little cleaning up.”
Armed with a chainsaw and gas-powered weedeater, Glore has almost single-handedly unveiled the cemetery from decades of overgrowth and underbrush. His wife and half-brother, Bill Smith, have helped out, too.
Glore has even built small, homemade white crosses and marked the unknown graves. There are a few headstones still standing, but the vast majority of the graves are unmarked.
“I’ve already made 50 crosses and that isn’t near enough,” he said.
Oddly, Glore has no other direct interest in the graveyard other than its close proximity to his home. He has no family there, doesn’t even know anyone interred there and, to be quite honest, he doesn’t know who the cemetery or the land around it belongs to.
Glore grew up in that area near the Crittenden-Livingston line and always remembers the graveyard being there. His grand-daughter’s line about God’s gardens was the spark that pushed him to do something about the resting place that had grown over with vines, sassafras trees and oaks.
“I’d always heard that it was a colored cemetery,” Glore said.
Indeed it is. A little genealogy research courtesy of local historian Brenda Underdown helped uncover the cemetery’s story. Underdown pointed out that Brenda Joyce Jerome did some research regarding the cemetery and much of it is printed in The Crittenden County Kentucky Cemeteries, Revised, Volume 1.
At one time there was a church there, too. Glore said he figured that was so because he remembers an old well being on the edge of the property many years ago. It has since been filled in with dirt.
According to Jerome’s research, the land for the cemetery and church was originally recorded in Deed Book O at the Crittenden County Courthouse in 1877 upon transfer from a Davidson family to the trustees of the church.
The last burial at the cemetery appears to have been in 1973 when Rev. William P. Foreman was interred.
“I always heard that he was brought up here from Paducah and buried,” said Glore.
Foreman’s gravestone has his photo on it. A distinguished looking man, Foreman was only 50 years old when he died.
The cemetery book records many names of the people buried there, many in those in unidentified graves. There are Moores, Crawfords, Rutters, a Coleman, a Coffield and some Walkers. Dozens of other names are listed in the cemetery book.
Although Glore has been working on the clean-up job for a month and half, he’s still only about two-thirds finished. The cemetery is very large, about an acre and half.
Glore remembers as a child walking near the cemetery and it was well kept.
“It didn’t have any brush or trees growing in it, nothing other than a few cedars,” he said.
Glore was born near Tolu but moved to a farm right behind the cemetery when he was 18 months old. His father was building a new house the next year across the road when he was killed by a relative.
A retired coal miner who still enjoys a little coon hunting, Glore says he will keep working until the graveyard is back in pristine condition. His wife has helped paint and refurbish the wrought iron sign out front that again proudly displays its name.