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mcc-jrr_651-022

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Unnamed Cemetery, 65-1 Summary Report, page 22

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The above newspaper clipping shows that Oscar, the son of John H. Hundley Sr., became an attorney in Huntsville by the 1890s. Overall, the family prospered in the pre-Civil War days by using slave labor to farm extensive land holdings. However, after the war, they continued to prosper in professional occupations. If the cemetery in the NW/4 of Section 17 in T5-R1W was in fact a slave cemetery, the land was owned for the longest period (1838 - 1870) prior to the Civil War by the slave-owning Hundley family. In fact, even the part that was sold to James E. Clark and his wife Lucy Lanier Ives Clark was passed by her Last Will & Testament into Hundley hands. It was not until 1870 (after the end of the Civil War in 1865) that the land passed from Hundley ownership to John Simpson. Therefore, the Simpson slaves of before the Emancipation Proclamation would not be prime candidates for having been buried in this cemetery. Still, the Hundley slaves were not so numerous as to have required such a large cemetery during their period of ownership, so it is suspected that later black families used the site for a community cemetery. As early as 1893, Zebulon Joiner appears in the land records for this parcel. However, it was not until 1919 that the Simpson and Proctor ownership was 22 - (2372)    

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