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The People Who Lived on the Land that is Now Redstone Arsenal, page 400
Where Helen Lived: Parcel A-33
The house the Rectors rented was identified as being on Parcel A-33 because the directions Helen described in getting to it from Triana put it in that vicinity. This in itself was not sufficient to place it. However, when discussing life at their rented house, she stated, “To the west of the front door, not very far, less than what would be the width of a yard [meaning the yard around a house], were very old headstones. Some were homemade. They used to put a stone, a natural stone, at the grave and write on it. I remember one grave had what looked like a bench for a marker.”
The researcher matched the directions that Helen had given to the house and the RSA Cemetery Map. Rawlings-Lanier Cemetery was shown in the location that would fit Helen's directions. The researcher consulted John Rankin's photographic
record of RSA cemeteries. The Rawlings-Lanier cemetery had what Helen would call a “bench for a marker.”
The Rawlins-Lanier Cemetery. View from southeast corner. Photo by John Rankin.
While John P. Rankin was photographing the cemetery and scrutinizing the area around it for evidence of additional graves, he had noted a large stone that he speculated might be the base of a chimney and a scatter of bricks. John speculated that this was a
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historic house site. He noted the location of the probable house site as being about 30 yards east of the cemetery boundary. Helen remembered that the cemetery was “to the west, not very far, from the front door” of the house where she lived. Everything matched. Having discerned that the house where Helen lived was on Parcel A-33, located on the east side of the cemetery, the researcher then looked up this area on the Alabama State Site File map of recorded archaeological sites. One archaeological site is recorded to the southeast of the cemetery (Site 1Ma903).
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