Download [Page] [Document]
mcc-jrr_461-015
Moore - Landman Cemetery, 46-1 Summary Report, page 15
The article from the REDSTONE ROCKET newspaper below adds clues about the history of this cemetery: REUNION - T-shirts like these worn by Rond end Adie Stewar proclaiming the Mullins Rat-Pond Beat reunion were popular i his aver boy was a of the _ to his now andthen 'Papa Pete' to ed.” | Ex-resident remen bers ‘Papa Pete had store, gin anc' blacksmith shop Charles Bums remembers well the gleaming t lack hearse pulled by a team of big horses in bright har ess. He walked alongside, struggling to keep up a grandfather's funeral procession wended its way back-country roads to the family cemetery. That was in 1919. James Peter Bums had die 1 of double pneumonia. Charles Bums was a little boy then, but the memory of his grandfather has not >een lost over time. James Peter Bums was a merchant and casket maker in the Mullins Flat community whose businesses were situated near where building 4488 stands tc0ay. “He would take me to the store everyday. It vic country store and I can still remember the smell < candy,” Charles Burns related. “Then we'd go L __ gin and to his blacksmith shop and every now and then someone would come up to him and ask '1 build a casket for so-and-so who had died.” Charles Burns lived at Silver Hill, which was along Dodd Road where the test stands are located. Hewas born in the home of his maternal grandparents, Everett T. and Frances Lacy Horton. He is writfag a book on “the life story of Huntsville and my folts.” Charles Burns' father, John Wesley Bums, sold insurance. He moved his family to Chicago in 1930 and set himself up as an insurance broker. Charles, 74, still has that business and is in the process of turning it over to his own son and daughter. Around 1980, Charles Burns decided to visit the gravesite of the grandfather that he remembers so fondly. Things had changed so much in the halfcentury since Bums had been there that it took him five years of research to determine where the cemetery was. And once he did find it, “it was so grown up that you couldn't even walk around in there,” he said. The Sam Moore Cemetery, named after the man who donated the land, is on a knoll overlooking a backwater area of Indian Creek. It is about a quarteracre in size. The ground is stippled with nmammrai periwinkle plants put there many years ago. None of the graves have headstones but some are marked with field stones. Bums knows the general location of plots containing his grandfather and grandmother and a great uncle and aunt because a cedar tree was planted at the head of each grave when the relative was interred. The cemetery is located behind NASA building 4628. Bums contacted Marshall Space Flight Center and they cleaned it up and installed a fence and gate. Last year he and other Bums descendants bought a large granite monument to mark the final resting place of their namesakes in Mullins Flat. "1 appreciate them even in death and want my folks and everybody to know where my people are buried,” Burns said. I i < Redstone Rocket article of 1987 15 - (1946)