Bush Arbor Branch

Roberts Cemetery

Cemetery = Roberts Cemetery

Vicinity = Sopchoppy NW

Status = neglected

Community = white

Synonymous name(s) = Bush Arbor Branch Cemetery

A plot perhaps 25 yards N-S by 20 yards E-W partly cleared of undergrowth on the slope of Bush Arbor Branch contains a three-foot-tall gravestone inscribed to Confederate veteran Richard Roberts (1828-1890), and several other graves without stones. The site, recorded by the 1940-41 veterans' graves registration on account of the Richard Roberts grave, lies a short distance west (riverward) of the old Sopchoppy-Smith Creek road, the path of which is still discernible here 250 yards west of C-375. The site is in a terrain of longleaf pine and saw palmetto, quite open, sloping to the branch. Access from the highway is at a point about 0.4 mile north of Red Lake Rd., at a newly established camp or homesite.

The Richard Roberts stone, placed here evidently about 1975, stands at the SE corner of the plot only 30 yards outside the fringe of the Bush Arbor Branch wetland thicket corridor. Four other graves are sharply outlined by drink bottles placed mouth-down in the ground in tight formation, two of these graves beside that of Richard Roberts and two others 50 feet north. No other graves are apparent.

The January 1976 issue of the Magnolia Monthly, in a note trailing an article “Lease Roberts of Smith Creek,” reported the grave of a person of the surname Carraway, with no tombstone. That article and a lengthy note in the January 1967 issue reported on the grave of Richard Roberts, both calling the place Bush Arbor Branch Cemetery and the January 1976 issue of the MM referred to it as "the Bush Arbor Branch Cemetery in Smith Creek." The December 1975 issue, in a general news section, reported that the Richard Roberts tombstone had been recently placed.

A one-inch square steel tube planted and standing five feet tall marks the NE corner of the graveyard plot made apparent by the clearing.

Date of site report narrative - July 2006

Surveyed by members of the WCHS, July 2006

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