Archaeological Assessment of the Jennings Family Cemetery, Clarke County

Per your request of August 17, my partner Chad Braley and I archeol9gically delineated the cemetery near MtNutt Creek and Jennings Mill Road on August 18, 1997 . . As you know, the cemetery, often referred to as the Jennings Family Cemetery, had been surveyed by Ben McElroy in 1990 as a seven-sided polygon. We were able to relocate all seven comers, which are now marked by green metal fence stakes with red tops or re-bar driven into the ground and marked with red flagging.

With the tentative outline of the cemetery marked, we then walked the area and marked all obvious, visible graves with white or dark blue pin flags placed at the west end of each grave. We ran out of pin flags and did not mark some of the more obvious graves. After this was accomplished, we could 'see that the graves fell into two clusters, with about 22 graves in the western cluster and about 86 graves in the eastern cluster (see enclosed map of cemetery). We then recorded the names and birth/death dates for the graves with markers (see attached list).

All of the visible graves were within the boundaries previously established by McElroy, although the western-most tombstone (of Elizabeth Jennings) is only three feet from the boundary. We then used solid metal probes one meter in length to probe out from the outlying known graves, to detect other graves that had no field stone markers, depressions or other visible indications. Our probing was most intensive at the west end of the cemetery, to the west of the grave of Elizabeth Jennings. There were a few surface undulations here, but none proved to be graves. We probed to as much as 20 feet west of the Elizabeth Jennings grave, probing m north-south lines where additional rows of graves would likely be. No graves were encountered. We also visually inspected to about 100 feet west of the visible graves, and found no indicators of graves. Therefore, we conclude that the Elizabeth Jennings grave (number 1 on the map) is the westernmost grave in the cemetery.