Mays (?)

Stewart Cemetery

Cemetery = Stewart Cemetery

Vicinity = Wakulla N

Status = abandoned

Community = white

Synonymous name(s) = Mays Cemetery(?)

A heavy wrought-iron fence about 12 feet by 12 feet stands inconspicuously in full-canopy hammock about 350 yards east of SR363 just north of Wakulla Station community. The site is perhaps 120 yards north of the latitude of a brick residence at No. 4 Ann Circle (a property also fronting SR 363), northeast of that residence as coordinated by the easting from SR 363. The location well matches the point identified on the official highway map as Stewart Cemetery. No gravestones are apparent within the fence or outside. Small remainders of a hogwire fence at places about 20 yards apart may possibly indicate an east-west dimension of the long-abandoned graveyard. Lettering wrought on the iron fence gives the surname Argyle preceded by initials. Nathan Stewart, who identifies this as the Stewart Cemetery, doesn't know anything of the significance of the name Argyle. The veterans' graves registration of 1940-41 records Stewart Cemetery but gives two forms of locating data contradicting each other. One datum, the section-township-range fix, perhaps fits this place acceptably, while the narrative locating directions indicate an area a few miles south (the 1940-41 document is often faulty in such data).

Charles Sonny Branch (b. ca. 1940) of Tallahassee says that he knows that the graves in the iron-fence enclosure are those of two wives of 'Hijie' Hall and one child. He reports that there is near the iron-fence enclosure a grave some of whose brick encasing remains. He says that that is the grave of Hijie Hall. (A 1996 Hall genealogy by Marilee Gerrell Butler lists Ahijah Hall b.1814; historian Pete Gerrell of Woodville says that he has not been able to establish in his research that the prominent landowner Ahijah Hall had a wife). Mr. Branch also says that the grave of his grandfather James Silas Branch is in this cemetery at a spot he has not been able to learn. He says there may be a hundred graves in the plot. He says that some besides the Halls are Stewarts, Mays, and Kirklands, although he does not know names of particular persons interred here except as given just above. This raises the question whether this site may answer also for one of two Hall cemeteries recorded in 1940-41; that registration gave a location fitting acceptably this vicinity. (This site would not correspond to Kirkland Cemetery recorded in 1940-41; that site recorded then as "colored" is well identified with an abandoned cemetery lying 5/8 mile southeast where many tombstones of African Americans are found today, evidently in the old Kirkland estate.) Sonny Branch does not know of any Argyles buried here. He was first shown the site by Asa Stewart of Woodville, who has long been acquainted with it.

Asa Stewart (b. 1915) says that he was raised close to the cemetery, and reports much the same information as Sonny Branch. He says there likely are a hundred graves in a plot covering the greater part of an acre. He says that the bricks represent the Hijah Hall grave. The grave of the Hall baby that Mr. Branch places inside the iron fence Mr. Stewart places just outside. His grandfather John Skipper (J.S.) May, whose sister was one of those wives of Hijah Hall (Mr. Stewart does not recall her name), is buried here. Mr. Stewart says that this plot was the burying ground of the Mays, and he considers their graves to be a part of this Stewart Cemetery, and not a separate one; he says he is not aware of any other cemetery in this remnant block of hammock. He says that the property was once part of a large landholding of Hijah (or Ahijah) Hall, and seems to say that the cemetery is recorded somehow in courthouse records, but seems not to say it's recorded as a tax-roll parcel.

Ava Culbreth Wilson (b. ca. 1919) of Culbreth Lane at Wakulla says that this strip of woods just south of Savannah Rd. and north of the houses along the north arm of Ann Circle contains the May burying place that she considers as distinct from the Stewart one. This seems perhaps a differing interpretation of the same, or some of the same, place about which Asa Stewart speaks. Mrs. Culbreth supposes that the May gravemarkers may still stand at this site which she hasn't seen in a long time. (Official maps label as "Mays" Cemetery, perhaps by mistake, the African American cemetery not far away that is identified by Mrs. Wilson and others as Kirkland Cemetery; Mrs. Wilson feels that the label May or Mays for that site is simply incorrect. A separate report covers that site, and the name question, under the heading Kirkland or Mays Cemetery.)

Mariah Hall of Wakulla also identifies a discrete May Cemetery that she seems to place near, or with, this site of the Stewart Cemetery (all of it a place that she hasn't visited in a long time; she does not recall whether or not an iron fence like that extant at the reported Stewart site marked the May site.)

Alan Gerrell, Jr., of Woodville says that Willie Stewart (? of Woodville) can provide a list of the burials in the Stewart Cemetery.

The veterans' graves registration recorded the graves of veterans William J. Stewart (William J. Stewart is buried elsewhere), Johnnie Curtis Godwin, Miles Henry Godwin, and John David Rollins for the Stewart Cemetery. The registration gave, as stated above, two contradictory lines of location information. However, Mr. Branch and Mr. Stewart are in no doubt that the site they describe above is the Stewart Cemetery of record.

Date of site report narrative - January 2002

Some information is taken from Register of Deceased Veterans 1940-41

and from the research of Nathan Stewart

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