Davidson County historical cemetery documentation effort hits halfway mark
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — A years-long project by the Metro Nashville Historical Commission has reached the halfway mark. The project is an effort to re-survey hundreds of historical cemeteries and find ones that may have been overlooked during their original documentation completed nearly 25 years ago.
Officials with the Metro Nashville Historical Commission are working on the Davidson County Cemetery Survey – a five-year plan to document roughly 650 historical cemetery sites. The project, which involves re-surveying, is now in its third phase, with Caroline Eller helping to lead the effort.
“We go out and complete site surveys using survey forms, taking current photographs, and we’re also getting updated GPS coordinates to identify the boundaries of these locations because many of them aren’t on their own parcel, so we want to make sure that we have those mapped internally for our records,” said Caroline Eller, a historic preservationist with the Metro Nashville Historical Commission.
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This project is being supported, in part, by the Historic Preservation Fund, administered by the National Park Service, the Department of the Interior, and the Tennessee Historical Commission. The efforts help to pay for the development of the first county-level cemetery preservation plan in the state.
“We are really aiming at the county-level, since we are Metro Government, to be able to help everybody, to be able to document all the different types of histories that we’ve got within the county. We have small family cemeteries — a lot of them are in rural areas, some of them are associated with churches or small communities that have since been forgotten,” said Eller.
The historical commission is in the third of the five-phase plan to re-survey. Over the course of the next two years, officials will hold public comment meetings for those looking to give information and learn more about the effort. Duke Family Cemetery in Whites Creek is among the sites teams are visiting this week.
Members of the area’s historical commission have partnered with Metro in this phase of the work.
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“From Nimrod Duke, aiding 1806, and then his son, Rodney Duke, aiding 1845, was buried here in 1926, so you have 150 years of history all right here under our feet, and those stories are important because they’re the fabric of the history of this community,” said Angela Williams, a volunteer with the Whites Creek Historical Commission. “These are the storytellers, it’s just up to us to discover their stories and to put them together and we’re discovering daily how important it is.”
The complete preservation plan is not only important for documentation, but for the larger goal of highlighting the necessary repairs, cleaning, and maintenance for the sites in the future.
“That’s something that’s really important as part of this plan to outline what resources are out there and help us advocate for that kind of funding,” said Eller.
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