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Maple Hill Cemetery, Phase 1, page xiv
#1, this new section contains cemetery Sections 10 through 15, and most of Sections D through Potter's Field to the east. M
Two sections in the newest addition were to be reserved for religious congregations. A Hebrew Burial Ground was authorized by the City Council. The earliest burial here was that of Robert Herstein, who settled in Huntsville prior to 1855. He was buried in Maple Hill in 1878. •Directly opposite in Section 15, a Catholic Burial Ground was developed. As with the Jewish Section, dates are not available either in cemetery records or at Temple B'nai Shalom or the Church of the Visitation for the specific dates of dedication. However, in 1939, Charles and Eliza Certain Rolfe sold to the City a lot which is specified in the area "known as the Catholic Section".
For easier access to these new areas, the City Council voted to open a new road into the cemetery from California Street "by the Jewish Section" in 1895. This entry was called Cemetery Alley. Another sale of lots to the City occurred in 1953 when Edwin Dudley Burwell sold Lots 6 and 7 in Block 10 which would allow for the expansion of the Cemetery Office.
Even with the addition of more than 12 acres, the demand continued to grow for new burial sites to the point that on September 6, 1881, further land was obtained to the immediate east of the original cemetery and the William H. Pope Lot #1 addition. This property, 3.2 acres, was obtained for $341.00 from Morris and Henrietta Bernstein who had purchased property from the court-enforced sale of the George Steele Estate at public auction on December 6, 1880.18 The Bernsteins secured 30 acres of the Steele property for $26.25 per acre, or a total of $795.00. The remaining portion of this land was obtained later to create the Chapman-Lee residential subdivision created in 1888.
The Bernstein purchase was important because it now provided a straight line southward for all of the city property down to the holdings of James B. White, or Lot #4 of the William H. Pope property. This allowed the city to add new streets within the cemetery proper and included sections designated as A through C, to join D through the Potter's Field of the Donegan property. The cemetery became an enclosed rectangle with common borders on all sides.
The need for further expansion was due to a number of probable causes. The age of the city now produced third and fourth generation families with no burial spaces in the older sections for their growing families. The coming of an industrialized economy based on cotton manufacturing in the 1880s and later would essentially double the town's population. Although two mill village cemeteries were to be created, one for the Dallas community and later one for Merrimack Village, these families too desired to be buried at Maple Hill.
To meet this challenge and to prepare for the future, the city purchased additional lands south of the Donegan Addition of 1873 when Mary Y. McClelland of St. Louis, Missouri, offered 6.14 acres to the city on June 3, 1903. Her asking price was $1,600. This transaction involved two sections: one was about 2.14 acres which Thomas White gave his son, James B. White, in 1871. This was part of Lot #4 of the William H. Pope sale. The property fronted on California Street and McClung Avenue extended. The second property was immediately behind this lot and was also conveyed by Thomas White to his son on November 20, 1886.19 This secti0n was about 4 acres and was west of additional White property which would be divided by his heirs and sold at a later date for a private cemetery.
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