Hidden cemetery could be one of many in West Tennessee

JACKSON, Tenn. — It’s a patch of land that could be confused with someone’s side yard, but if you look closely, you can see a single headstone in the shadows.

“It’s interesting to me because it seems so tightly packed into the houses and everything around it,” said Jack Wood, Tennessee Room librarian at the Jackson-Madison County Library.

It’s the Wallace-Knight Cemetery, which is believed to have once been a family grave site, before the hospital area began to grow.

“Cemeteries like this quite often started out in a rural area, on a farm or estate of some kind,” he said.

At this point, it’s unknown how many people are actually buried under the trees.

“We know at least two people that are buried there, and they’re in our files here,” Wood said. “We have death certificates of two individuals.”

From what the headstone reads, the person buried there is W.R. Wallace. He was born in 1847 and died 30 years later in 1877.

“It’s interesting because we can see how urban encroachment kind of builds up around these things and yet it’s preserved in there,” Wood said. “If we go to the tax assessor’s office website, you can see it’s been cordoned off as a cemetery.”

It’s not uncommon for people to come across small cemeteries in their neighborhoods.

“There’s some school of thought that if you look at this like a historical treasure when you’re building a subdivision or something like that, and you run across something like this, here’s an opportunity to lend a historical touch to your new development,” Wood said.

The Jackson-Madison County Library keeps records of historical places in the county, including cemeteries like this one.