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Lynch Cemetery, 89-3 Summary Report, page 10
Note that the second page of the deed shown above states that the land was sold to William Joiner, Elisha Joiner, and James Timmons - “all (coloured)”. While no entry of the INDEX TO LANDS showed any purchase of the cemetery area by anyone named Lynch, it is known that the black Joiner and Timmons families were closely allied and intermarried with the black Lynch families of the early arsenal land history. The 1870 census page below shows the three men who purchased the land around the cemetery (which must therefore actually be in the NW/4 of Section 22) enumerated in adjacent households in the Green Grove Post Office area of T5-R1W. The household of James Timmons even included a Louis Lynch in 1870. Another Lynch family was enumerated nearby, at the bottom of the page. Other pages of the census for the Green Grove area contain many more Lynch families. It is not at all unlikely that the Joiners and the Timmons who owned the land initiated a cemetery to serve their black families, and thereafter also allowed their neighbors (including, but not limited to, the Lynch families) to use the burying ground. In fact, it would be more surprising if they did not establish a graveyard on the land that they now owned, rather than continuing to bury their family members on land that they did not own. Indeed, the cemetery may have already existed as a slave cemetery before the Civil War, and that could well be the reason that the Joiners and James Timmons wanted to buy that particular parcel of land. It most likely already contained the bones of their ancestors, and they wanted to have control of the land of their fathers.
For the cemetery to end up with the name “Lynch Cemetery” in local memories (or whatever source gave it the name) indicates that many of the Lynch families' members were buried here. There may have even been some tombstones with the name inscribed at one time, but there are none today.
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