The Knox sisters, originally of Forrest County, were disheartened back in 2013 when they tried to find their grandparents’ final resting place, Gillis Burkett Cemetery. While they’d visited the cemetery many times, it had been many years since they’d last visited, and the property seemed to have disappeared into the tree line of 1921 James Street.
After years of pursuing help from the City of Hattiesburg and the Forrest County Board of Supervisors, a case of legal limbo involving the ownership of the surrounding property brought the progress to a halt. Back in 1947, the Burkett family willed the cemetery to the community of Palmer’s Crossing. The problem is that the cemetery is also land-locked within a large parcel of private property, and an easement was never signed to allow for the use of the road leading up to it.
Determined not to allow their loved ones and more than 40 veterans of every conflict going back to the Civil War to fall by the wayside, Thelma Knox and Tiara Knox-Husband took the initiative and organized their own cleanup effort. Knox-Husband travelled home from South Carolina, and with the help of the Youth Challenge Academy cadets, a professor with a group of students from USM and a group of volunteers within the community, the work began in Palmer’s Crossing.
Over the course of four days, chainsaws, lawn trimmers, garden loppers and handsaws worked tirelessly toward the goal of honoring families and veterans in their final resting places. Many graves were only identifiable by the casket-shaped depression in the ground, others had tall, intricate stone headstones clearly meant to last through the ages and still others were adorned with concrete headstones- hand-shaped with details written when the concrete was still wet.
The names in Gillis Burkett cemetery are all too familiar in the Hattiesburg area- McCullum, Carter, Gillis, Davis and Dantzler, just to name a few. Hattiesburg’s first medical doctor and Confederate officer, John Gillis, lies among a row of Gillis graves, many of them bearing the details of their services to the Confederacy. While the cemetery began as a Confederate graveyard, that’s not how it remained. After erecting chain-link fencing around the Confederate and white graves, much of the rest of the cemetery was primarily used for the Black families in Palmer’s Crossing- a harrowing reminder of the tragedy of the past and civil rights struggles.
By the time Veterans Day arrived, the cemetery was nearly unrecognizable from the patch of wild overgrowth from the Wednesday before. There is still much work to be done, but graves were found and uncovered, brush was cleared and burned, dignity was restored to families perhaps long-forgotten and flags adorned the graves of veterans.
This is an ongoing story. More details will be shared as they come available.
