cheathamcemeteryinformation

The Hooper home place is divided into three 10 acre tracts with homes built on most parcels. The cemetery is located in what was once an orchard (no trace of fruit trees left) and is located beside a modern log home. I took these pictures at the Hooper cemetery in Cheatham county and the 5 graves on what was the Hooper home place earlier this Spring (2003). The 5 graves have individual plain field stones on each grave with a single monument engraved with 3 sets of names/dates along one side and 2 on another side of the same marker. All appear to be children. The white appearance on the writing is simply plain bleached wheat flour. A friend taught me this technique a few years ago. It is messy, but harmless to the stones. Simply take a handful of flour and rub it over the stone filling in the engravings and dusting off the excess on the flat portions of the marker. This makes the engravings visible for photographing. The flour is blown away, washed away by rain or eaten by insects within a few days.

The Hooper cemetery is located on Highway 249 between Pegram, TN and River Road along Sams Creek. This section of the highway was originally part of Old Sams Creek Road. There are a number of other family names in the cemetery, ie. Cullum, Dozer, Crouch, etc. but I focused only on Hooper tombstones during this visit. If there are relatives who would like pictures of other family names I would be happy to take and forward along photos of those markers either in the fall or next spring when it is safe to visit the cemetery again (the grass gets tall in the summer and neighbors tell me there are lots of snakes including rattlers there).

A bit of history as it was told to me as a child about a couple of the markers at the Hooper family cemetery, there are two graves that are listed as outside the fence, EE and Geneva Hooper. When the cemetery was fenced in 1962 (I can pinpoint the date because we heard of Marilyn Monroe's suicide on the radio while retrieving more gravel for cementing fence posts while working at the cemetery), family members wanted to make sure these two graves were not inside the fence as they were originally burried outside the boundaries of the cemetery. As the story goes, EE was accused of being a horse thief and both he and his wife were relegated to being burried outside the cemetery as outcasts. My father told me this story as he worked (and I supposedly helped, but wasn't very much help in reality) to fence the cemetery.

Mike Hooper is owner of the land. His dad was a first cousin of my father's. My Dad had maintained the cemetery for the family for many years and my brother and I had helped occasionally. In the later years of his life, he was only able to maintain the portion around Thomas Smiley and John's graves. My brother and I cleaned up that small area a time or two after our father's death. The Cheatham County Historical Society cleaned off the entire cemetery a year or so ago and plans to maintain it and other old family cemeteries in the area.

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