Kinsey West

"Kinsey West Cemetery"

Cemetery = "Kinsey West Cemetery" (stand-in name)

Vicinity = Wakulla S

Status = not located

Community = unknown

Ed Page (b. 1923) of Wakulla well recalls an unusual graveyard beside a rut road one mile or 1¼ mile south of the Upper Bridge Rd. (Shadeville-to-Wakulla Hwy.) and east of the Wakulla River. He estimates the number of graves as 18 or 20, with all markers head and foot being natural limerocks. He and his brother, who rambled through the site occasionally in their youth, either fancied or heard talk that it was Indian graves. Mr. Page's brother sought to locate the site again some 10 years ago, without success. Then both brothers went again, without success. The area had been timbered and otherwise worked over.

Mr. Page says that the site seems to have been in what was then or later the Goddard Plantation and is now River Plantation and Hunter's Glen subdivisions. Mr. Page says it was perhaps ¼ mile inside the present fence or boundary (?east boundary) of that tract. Access to the vicinity is by a rut road leaving the Upper Bridge Rd. at the J.D. Turner home that sits on the S side of the paved road. This may be the road that earlier ran south to the Kinsey farm. At any rate, Mr. Page references the Kinsey Farm road and Kinsey farm house in his directions. The house may have been in the vicinity of the graveyard. Mr. Page feels, after his own attempt at finding the graves again, that they cannot now be located, but he can be consulted further.

There is other testimony to one or more lost graveyards in this territory (one other being the Kinsey South site in the list above). Fred Kinsey (b. 1914) says that T.J. Posey and Jack Ward (b. 1896), both of St. Marks and now deceased, came to the vicinity some years back and searched for a known or reported graveyard of their kin, and that they did not find it. Mr. Kinsey says that graves marked by limestone boulders and nothing else were common if not typical in this territory. Narrative locating directions given in the veterans' grave registration of 1940-41 place three cemeteries — Chaires, Kennedy and Stewart — in what seems to be the same vicinity as this reported site and the "Kinsey South" site. The Chaires site can be identified with the Cates Cemetery marked on official maps, but the complex of potential sites still left after that in this one vicinity is unresolved. For the four potential sites remaining unlocated, there may be fewer than four actual sites (data given in 1940-41 for the Stewart site is evidently confused, some of it fitting well the presently known location of a Stewart Cemetery north of Wakulla Station). And whether any reports related in the entry above for "Hunter's Glen" may relate to this site is also undetermined.

Date of site report narrative - October 2001

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