Sacred Ground: Bowling Harness Cemetery
Long before folks were settling in Huntsville, or in the railroad towns that would come later in places like Oneida, Helenwood, and Glenmary, they were settling in the fertile stream bottoms that were shadowed by the Cumberland Mountains — Buffalo Creek, Smokey Creek, No Business Creek and New River.
One of those stream bottoms was Bull Creek, and even before Scott County was formed in 1849, the Bowling and Harness families were making their homes here.
With time, the Bowling Harness Cemetery — located on a small ridge overlooking the valley near the stream’s headwaters — came to be the final resting place for many of those early Bull Creek settlers.
Today, the cemetery of those early Bull Creek families is largely forgotten. It is kept free of overgrowth but isn’t regularly mowed or maintained. The only road leading to it requires a four-wheel-drive to navigate.
To put it mildly, Bowling Harness Cemetery is a long way from anywhere. It’s about 10 miles from the nearest state-paved road to the Bull Creek United Baptist Church, and the cemetery is located about three miles beyond the church.
It was near this cemetery that the community’s Baptist church was once located, before it was moved about three miles further north, down the creek. Today, the final leg of the journey to Bowling Harness Cemetery — nearly all of the three miles beyond where the church is now located — is along a dirt road that is mostly used for recreation by off-highway vehicles. It is pitted with potholes and lurches along Bull Creek, fording the stream in four different places.
There are only a handful of homes remaining at Bull Creek. You can count on one hand the permanent residences beyond the Bull Creek-Byrges Creek fork in the road. If not for the timber-cutting that remains a near constant activity up and down this valley and on the mountains that tower over it, Bull Creek would have mostly reverted back to the way it was before the first white settlers — including the Bowling and Harness families, along with the Lawsons and Phillipses — arrived here in the early 1800s.
The Bowling family
The Bowling Harness Cemetery dates back to Greenberry Bowling (1828-1901) and his wife, Sylvestia Brown Bowling (1832-1864). Folks called him Berry, and her Vesta (or Vesty), and they had several children together before Vesty’s untimely death amid the Civil War.
The 1860 census, taken four years before Vesty died, listed five children in the Bowling home at Bull Creek. James, age 12, was the oldest. There was also 9-year-old Ewell, 6-year-old Harrison, 4-year-old Emeline, and 2-year-old Nancy.
When she died on Feb. 12, 1864, at the age of 31, Vesty Bowling became the first person buried at what would become the Bowling Harness Cemetery. Berry remarried to Christina Lawson and had several more children. Christina was a widow; she had been married to Scott County’s first court clerk, Allen McDonald, before his death two years earlier. Berry Bowling married a third time and had several more children.
The Bowling family at Bull Creek didn’t begin with Berry Bowling, however. It began with his father.
First, though, a brief foray into a source of genealogical confusion: The FindAGrave website, notorious for being fraught with errors, lists Berry Bowling as the son of Eli Bowling and Susannah Roberts — which would make him a direct descendant of Pocahontas, the famous Native American girl who married English colonist John Rolfe.
Family historians have traced the Bolling lineage — as it was originally spelled — back as far as 12th century England. It was in the 17th century that Col. Robert Bolling sailed from London to the New World, landing in Virginia colony on Oct. 2, 1660, at the age of 14. He married Jane Rolfe, the granddaughter of Pocahontas and John Rolfe. Robert Bolling was a direct ancestor to U.S. presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.
Whomever is responsible for the FindAGrave records traces the lineage thusly: Robert Bolling was the son of John Fairfax Bolling, who was the father of Maj. John Kennon Bolling II, who was the father of Rev. Benjamin Bolling Sr., who was the father of Jesse Bolling, who was the father of Eli Bowling, who was the father of Berry Bowling.
Based on that lineage, Berry Bowling would have been the sixth great-grandson of Pocahontas and John Rolfe.
However, the lineage seems very doubtful. Other genealogical records list Berry Bowling’s father as Andrew “Andy” Lucius Bowling, who was born in South Carolina in or about 1803 and later moved to Bull Creek.
Andy Bowling was from a completely separate line of Bollings, who migrated from England to the American colonies with James Bolling, born in 1680 and died 1729 in Virginia.
There is no record of Eli Bowling — who was from Kentucky — ever living in Scott County. But Andy Bowling’s presence here is well-documented. He received a land grant of 1,000 acres in Campbell County (which Bull Creek was a part of before Scott County was established in 1849), and later owned as much as 3,000 acres in Scott County. And he was buried at the Bowling Harness Cemetery when he died in 1865.
The 1850 census lists Andy Bowling as living in Scott County with his wife, Susannah, and six children. Berry Bowling, who would have been about 22 at the time, was not listed among them. That isn’t surprising because he was already married at the time. He and Vesta Bowling lived at Bull Creek with their one-year-old son, Ewell.
By the 1860 census, Andy Bowling had married Louisiana Jeffers Bowling. It’s not clear where either of his wives are buried.
The Harness family
The lineage of the Harness family that settled at Bull Creek isn’t as documented as that of the Bowling family.
However, it is fairly clear that some of the earliest Harnesses to settle there were the children of John Harness (1745-1845) and Mary “Polly” Wilson. Based on genealogy records, the Harness family may have been of German descent and originally spelled “Harnish.”
Among the children of John and Polly Harness who wound up at Bull Creek were brothers Samuel Harness and David Harness.
David Harness is buried at Bowling Harness Cemetery, though the date of his death isn’t clear. His grave is marked with a field stone that is simply inscribed with the initials “D.H.” He married Elizabeth Hughett and they had at least 10 children. Elizabeth is also buried at Bowling Harness Cemetery with a field stone inscribed with her initials, “E.H.H.”
Samuel Harness was first married to Nancy Harness, and later married Elizabeth Harness and then Susannah Bowling Lawson Harness. His burial location isn’t clear, though there are a number of stones at Bowling Harness Cemetery that are not inscribed.
The cemetery begins
Because there is a number of graves at the Bowling Harness Cemetery marked only by uninscribed field stones, it is hard to date the cemetery conclusively.
David Harness, for example, is buried at the cemetery but the date of his death isn’t clear. He is found in the 1860 census but not the 1870 census, meaning he likely died at some point in the 1860s. He may very well have been the first person buried at the cemetery.
The unknowns aside, the first verifiable burial at Bowling Harness Cemetery was Vesta Bowling, the wife of Berry Bowling, who died on Feb. 12, 1864, at the age of 31. (Her stone, which is now broken and resides in pieces at the cemetery, states that she was 28 when she died.)
The following year, Andy Bowling was buried at the cemetery. He died at age 61 or 62. Like several of his sons, including Berry Bowling, he served in the Civil War.
After that, there were no burials at the small cemetery for 15 years. On Oct. 15, 1880, 1-year-old Sarah Bowling died and was buried there. She was the daughter of Harrison and Nancy Hutson Bowling, the granddaughter of Berry Bowling.
The next burial was the first Harness to be buried at the cemetery. Samma Harness, age 23, died on Sept. 14, 1894. He was the son of William and Elvina Harness, and a grandson of Samuel Harness.
Four-year-old Evey Harness died on Nov. 14, 1896 and was buried at the cemetery. She was the daughter of Robbin and Delilah Goad Harness, and a great-granddaughter of David Harness. Her mother died four years later and was also buried at Bowling Harness Cemetery.
The same year that Delilah Harness died, 10-year-old Mary Bowling died and was buried at the cemetery. She was another daughter of Harrison and Nancy Hutson Bowling.
The following year, 1901, the infant son of Luke and Annie Harness was buried at the cemetery, followed by Mary Ann Hughett Bowling, who was the wife of Ewell Bowling and the daughter-in-law of Berry Bowling.
Berry Bowling died later that same year.
In 1903, the first person not named Bowling or Harness was buried at the cemetery: 56-year-old Thomas Cross. He was the husband of Nancy Phillips Cross. The Phillips family was another prominent early family at Bull Creek. The Phillips Cemetery is located a few miles down the valley.
A Bull Creek tragedy
In 1921, William Harness was murdered and buried at the cemetery. The 72-year-old Harness was the son of Samuel Harness, one of the original settlers of Bull Creek. The accused killer was 34-year-old Berry Bowling, the grandson of the Berry Bowling who was another of the original settlers of Bull Creek.
See Also: Mob’s wrath invoked by widow’s slaying — Murders in the Heartland
The details of what precipitated the murder of Harness were never fully clear. Harness had married Elvira Brown, and they had 10 children before she died in 1913. Following her death, he remarried to Mary Jane Lawson Bowling.
Like the Harnesses and the Bowlings, the Lawson family’s roots run deep at Bull Creek. Mary Jane’s grandfather, Jacob Lawson, was another of the original settlers in the valley. She had married John Bowling in 1909 — Berry Bowling’s big brother.
When John Bowling died in 1915 (he is also buried at the Bowling Harness Cemetery), Mary Jane remarried to William Harness. He was considerably older than Lawson, who was in her mid 20s.
Berry Bowling was charged with the death of William Harness. A mistrial resulted, but not before Mary Jane had testified against her former brother-in-law.
Newspaper accounts from the time reported that Bowling was infuriated by Mary Jane’s testimony at his trial, and decided to kill her too. She was murdered on Tuesday, May 3, 1921, at the age of 33. Berry Bowling was arrested the next day.
At around midnight on the following Saturday night, Berry Bowling was hauled from the Scott County Jail in Huntsville by a masked mob. The high sheriff, E.M. Phillips, who was not at the jail when the raid occurred, placed the number of vigilantes in the mob at 25. Minutes from an NAACP meeting held the next month stated that 50 men hauled Bowling from the jail.
The mob led Bowling to a white oak tree on nearby River Junction Road and hanged him. According to a Nashville newspaper, the first rope broke, and the mob had to hoist up its victim a second time. After he was dead, his body was riddled with bullets and left hanging in the tree.
Bowling’s death certificate states that he was “hanged by a mob.”
No one was ever charged with his death.
The location of Bowling’s burial has always been in question. It has been speculated across the decades that residents of Bull Creek refused to let him be buried at the cemetery there, due to the heinous nature of the crime he was accused of.
Eventually, a headstone was placed in the corner of the cemetery, bearing his name. It has long been questioned whether he was actually buried at the cemetery, though; some said he was buried in an unmarked grave at Lone Mountain because the residents of Bull Creek allowed a headstone to be placed in the Bowling Harness Cemetery — it was, after all, the cemetery where many of his family were buried — but wouldn’t allow his body to actually be buried there.
However, the unnatural indentation of the earth in front of Bowling’s headstone indicates that someone was buried there — or, at least, a grave was dug.
Latter years
By the 1940s, burials at the Bowling Harness Cemetery had mostly ceased. The population had begun to drift away, and other cemeteries in the community had become more active.
Mose Bowling — the elder Berry Bowling’s son — was one of the last to be buried there, in 1949. His wife, Tennessee Harness, had also been buried there two years earlier. She was the granddaughter of David Harness, one of the Harness brothers who originally settled at Bull Creek.
John Harness, Tennessee’s older brother, was buried there following his death on March 6, 1950. He was the last person to be buried at the Bowling Harness Cemetery.
In total, there are more than six dozen graves at the cemetery.
Cemetery Census
BOWLING HARNESS CEMETERY
GPS Coordinates: 36.289009094, -84.449028015
First Burial: 1864
Lasts Burial: 1950
Amon Bowling 1881-1912
Andy Bowling 1803-1865
Berry Bowling 1886-1921
Don Bowling 1924-1924
Greenberry Bowling 1828-1901
Harrison Bowling 1854-1918
Infant Bowling 1920-1920
James Bowling N/A-N/A
John Bowling 1883-1915
Laura Bowling 1904-1905
Mary Bowling 1890-1900
Mary Hughett Bowling 1852-1901
Mose Bowling 1881-1949
Myrtle Bowling 1914-1914
Nancy Bowling 1922-1922
Roy Bowling 1918-1918
Sarah Bowling 1888-1905
Sarah E. Bowling 1878-1980
Sylvestia B. Bowling 1832-1864
Tennessee H. Bowling 1893-1947
Amos Brown N/A-N/A
Nancy Phillips Cross 1856-1937
Thomas Cross 1846-1903
Nancy Gibson N/A-N/A
Perna Gibson 1915-1917
Thomas Gibson 1893-1907
Betty A. Harness 1880-1934
David Harness 1882-N/A
Delilah Goad Harness 1871-1900
Eddie T. Harness N/A-N/A
Eldora Harness 1905-1905
Elizabeth H. Harness 1819-1906
Elvina Brown Harness 1851-1913
Evey Harness 1891-1896
Franklin Harness 1887-1904
Georgia Harness N/A-N/A
Helen Harness 1884-1912
Infant Harness 1901-1901
Infant Harness 1906-1906
Infant Harness 1907-1907
James Harness 1840-1919
Jasper Harness 1873-N/A
John Harness 1842-1911
John L. Harness N/A-1950
Johnie E. Harness 1904-1938
Lisabeth Harness 1843-1905
Martha York Harness 1878-1914
Nancy Harness N/A-N/A
Nancy Brown Harness 1847-1922
Rachel M. Harness 1886-N/A
Samma Harness 1870-1894
Sarah E. Harness 1888-1909
Thomas Harness 1846-1903
Ulyssess S. Harness 1896-1919
Viannie Harness 1902-1905
Vicy A. Harness 1890-1906
Vira Harness 1893-1944
William Harness 1848-1921
Lyda Neal Hutson 1829-1906
Polley Wilson 1902-1924
J.M.Y. N/A-N/A
Jeremiah York 1837-1915
Louisia Harness York 1844-1915
William H. York 1906-1910
This story is part of the Scott County Cemetery Project.