Sacred Ground: Hughett Cemetery (Brimstone)
Editor’s Note: The Hughett Cemetery (also known as the Goad Cemetery) at Brimstone has been the subject of past stories in the Independent Herald. However, as part of our Sacred Ground series, we are profiling each cemetery in Scott County, which includes revisiting some that have been featured previously.
Many inactive cemeteries share the same sad fate: They’re visited often, maintained well, and decorated frequently for a time. Then, after a couple of generations have passed and memories have begun to fade, they’re slowly forgotten. Some of them are left to the ceaseless toils of nature, which gradually erases them from view.
In some ways, the entire point of the Sacred Ground series is to pay homage to these burial grounds that are at risk of being forgotten. We’ve featured several of them already, such as the Keeton Cemetery at the Old Litton Place near Black Oak and the Nancy Smith Cemetery at No Business Creek.
The Hughett Cemetery at Brimstone is another of those cemeteries that fits this profile. In the past, we have referred to it as Brimstone’s forgotten cemetery. With each year that passes, fewer people know of its location, although it’s just a stone’s throw from the main road.
Located on the side of the hill overlooking the old Goad (and later Walker) family farm where Indian Fork Creek empties into Brimstone Creek, the Hughett Cemetery is in sad shape today. It hasn’t been tended to for several decades. It isn’t as sad a story as the Huntsville Cemetery (which is being restored by Boy Scout Troop #333 and will be featured by the Sacred Ground series in the weeks ahead), but it’s not far from it. While the Huntsville Cemetery is located in the middle of Old Huntsville and is the final resting place of many of the town’s early movers and shakers, the Hughett Cemetery has its own claim to prominence. Among those buried in this old family cemetery is the grandmother of a U.S. Congressman — and the great-grandmother of another Congressman.
There are 16 commercial stones at Hughett Cemetery, which was active between the years of 1863 and 1900. Most of the stones have broken from their bases over the years, but all of them are still legible. There are also what appears to be 11 graves marked with plain field stones. None of them are inscribed, and so there’s no way to know who is buried in those graves.
Ettie Tennessee Goad
The most prominent person buried at the Hughett Cemetery is Ettie Tennessee Goad Lee, though she likely wouldn’t have been considered any more or less important than her closest neighbors when she died in 1890, at the tender age of 22. But she had two daughters when she died. One of them, Cassie, married Flem Baird Duncan of the Paint Rock community and they became one of Huntsville’s leading families. One of their sons, John Duncan, was elected mayor of Knoxville and was a popular leader during the Civil Rights crisis of the 1960s. He later served multiple terms in U.S. Congress before his death in the 1980s (after which his son, John J. “Jimmy” Duncan Jr., was elected to succeed him). Today, his name is on the federal courthouse in downtown Knoxville. Another son, Joe Duncan, was elected as criminal court judge in Knoxville and later served on the Tennessee Court of Appeals.
Ettie Tennessee Goad was the daughter of Joshua Goad and Elizabeth Robbins Goad. Her father was the son of Joshua Goad Sr., the grandson of Abraham Goad, the Revolutionary War soldier who migrated to Huntsville and settled what would later be known as the Vanderpool Farm along New River. Her mother was the daughter of Michael Robbins and Mary Polly Lewallen Robbins, the granddaughter of Anderson Grant Lewallen, who settled in the Nydeck area south of Elgin shortly after the American Revolution.
Ettie’s great-uncle, John Lewallen, was Scott County’s first sheriff. She had a brother, John Goad, who also served as sheriff. In fact, John Goad was ordered by a jury to hang a Winfield man convicted of killing a school teacher. It was Scott County’s first and only legal hanging.
None of that has anything to do with the Hughett Cemetery, of course. In fact, the hanging didn’t even occur until four years after Ettie’s death. But it helps tell the story of who Ettie Tennessee Goad was.
Ettie married William Fred Lee. Originally from Byrdstown, Tenn., Fred came to Scott County as the superintendent of schools. After Ettie’s death, he owned a store on Rugby Road with his brother-in-law, John Goad (the sheriff).
Ettie died on Sept. 10, 1890, about 10 weeks after the birth of her second daughter, Minnie. Cassie Lee, who would be raised by her grandparents and become the mother of a Congressman and famous Knoxville mayor, was six years old at the time of her mother’s death.
When Ettie was buried in the cemetery overlooking the family farm, above the mouth of Huntsville Branch, she was at least the 10th person to be buried there (with 11 graves marked only with field stones, it’s impossible to know when burials began and ended).
A family cemetery
Ettie Tennessee Goad was the seventh and youngest child of Joshua and Elizabeth Robbins Goad. The Goad family was one marked by tragedy, and the family cemetery above Brimstone Road tells the story of those tragedies. Many of those buried at the cemetery before Ettie were her siblings.
In fact, only two of the Goad children lived to old age: John, who served as sheriff, and Almira Walker, who married Civil War veteran Daniel Walker and became the matriarch of one of Brimstone’s most deep-rooted and prominent families. (And, thus, how the Goad farm at Indian Fork Creek became the Walker farm, which it is known as today.)
The Hughett family
The early families along this section of Brimstone Creek included the Joseph Goad family, who made the move from New River up Brimstone Creek after he married Betty Robbins. And they also included the Walker family, Samuel and Mary Ann Hutson Walker, who had migrated to Brimstone Creek with their children from North Carolina.
Those families also included the Hughett family. In fact, that entire section of Brimstone would become known as Hughett after the U.S. Postal Service established a post office there. The first postmaster of the post office at nearby Slick Rock was Jasper Hughett, and so that became the name of the post office, and Hughett, Tennessee was born.
This is the story of the Goads, the Walkers, and the Hughetts.
A new cemetery
The first burial — or, at least, the first verifiable grave — on the hillside plot above the Goad/Walker farm was little Mandy Goad, who died on Oct. 10, 1863. She was just nine months old at the time of her death. She was the eighth child of Joshua and Betty Robbins Goad, and the first to die. At the time, Almira was 11 years old. John was just three. Ettie had not yet been born.
Phoebe Goad, Mandy’s older sister, died on March 11, 1870 at the tender age of 12 and was buried to the left of her sister. She was the second burial in what would become known as the Hughett Cemetery.
Just months later, on May 6, 1871, Lavina Goad — her parents called her “Vicie” — died at the age of 15 and was buried to the left of Phoebe. In just eight years, Joshua and Betty had buried three of their children on the hillside, a tragic row of three graves. Sadly, more were to come.
The cemetery grows
On June 6, 1872, baby Vicy Walker died. She was the one-year-old daughter of Daniel and Almira Walker. Daniel had escaped from a Confederate prison camp near the end of the Civil War and hiked hundreds of miles home to Brimstone Creek, subsisting on acorns and whatever else he could get his hands on to eat. He married Almira Goad and they had 15 children. Vicy was the third of those children, born Feb. 26, 1871. When she died, she was born alongside her young aunts on the mountainside.
Three years after Vicy’s death, on July 25, 1875, Christena Lewallen Hughett died at the age of 46 and was buried at the cemetery. To that point, only children had been buried there, at least among the verifiable graves. Christena was the first adult buried there.
Remember that the community became known as Hughett because of its postmaster, Jasper Hughett? Christena Hughett was Jasper’s mother. He was 19 at the time of her death.
If you’re wondering how Christena Hughett came to be buried in what was basically a family cemetery, it’s because she was family. She was the daughter of Joel Lewallen, who was a brother to Mary Polly Lewallen Robbins — Betty Robbins Goad’s uncle.
In fact, both Joel and his wife, Rachel Taylor Lewallen, would be buried at the cemetery following their deaths on March 6, 1892 (they died on the same day, at the ages of 88 and 93, respectively).
More young deaths
Pharozina Goad was the second adult buried at the cemetery when she died on June 10, 1879. She was only 25 when she died. She was buried in the row of graves behind her sisters: Mandy, Vicie and Phoebe.
On Nov. 30, 1884, one-year-old Flora Walker died. She was another of Daniel and Almira’s children.
The year 1890 was an especially tragic one for the family. Five-year-old Ella Hughett died on Jan. 15. She was Jasper Hughett’s daughter.
Just five months later, on June 12, Ella’s nine-year-old brother, John Sherman, died and was also buried there.
And on Sept. 10, Ettie Tennessee Goad Lee died just 10 weeks after the birth of her second daughter.
On June 16, 1893, Bettie Hughett Robbins died in childbirth at the age of 22. She was married to Mitt Robbins, who would go on to serve as Scott County Judge (a forerunner to County Executive and County Mayor) from 1926 to 1934. She was the daughter of John and Christena Hughett, a brother to Jasper Hughett. She was buried at the cemetery, as well.
And two months after Bettie’s death, her son who she died giving birth to, John Sherman Robbins, named for his young uncle who had died three years earlier, died and was buried alongside his mother. A row of three graves at the cemetery consists of grandmother (Christena), mother (Bettie) and son (John Sherman).
Jasper Hughett’s wife, Vicie Robbins Hughett, died on Feb. 8, 1894 at the age of 33 and was buried at the cemetery.
Finally, on June 11, 1900, William Goad died at the age of 35 and was buried at the cemetery. He was the brother of Pharozina, Vicie, Phoebe and Ettie.
The end of the cemetery
As far as the graves that can be verified, William Goad’s was the last.
So why did the family cemetery stop being used in 1900? That isn’t completely clear. A new community cemetery — Slick Rock — had started just up the road. When Betty and Joshua Goad died, in 1907 and 1910, that’s where they were buried (in fact, they were among the very first people to be buried at Slick Rock).
John Goad — the last of the surviving children of Joshua and Betty Goad — moved to Oneida, where he became superintendent of Oneida Hosiery Mills. When he died in 1933, he was buried at Potter Cemetery in Huntsville.
Jasper Hughett remarried to Mary Etta Pemberton after Vicie died in 1894, moved to Robbins, and opened a general store next door to the bank. His only surviving child with Vicie, William Freeman Hughett, left the area as well.
The only of the three families to remain at Indian Fork were the Walkers. When Daniel died in 1902, he was buried on the end of a ridge on the opposite side of the family farm (as was Almira when she died 22 years later).
One clue as to why the Hughett Cemetery ceased to be active might be found in its topography. The cemetery is located on a mountainside “bench” just above the old road. On one end of the cemetery is a bank that drops abruptly to the road. On the other end, very large rocks litter the bench. It may be that the cemetery simply ran out of room.
Cemetery Inventory
HUGHETT CEMETERY (BRIMSTONE)
GPS Coordinates: 36.31909, -84.51062
First Burial: 1863
Last Burial: 1900
Burials Since Robert Bailey’s 1994 Cemetery Census? No.
Lavina “Vicie” Goad, 1856-1871
Mandy Goad, 1863-1863
Pharozina Goad, 1854-1879
Phoebe Goad, 1857-1870
William Goad, 1864-1900
Christena Lewallen Hughett, 1829-1875
Ella Hughett, 1884-1890
John Sherman Hughett, 1880-1890
Vicie Robbins Hughett, 1860-1894
Ettie Goad Lee, 1867-1890
Joel Lewallen, 1803-1892
Rachel Taylor Lewallen, 1798-1892
Bettie Hughett Robbins, 1871-1893
John Sherman Robbins, 1893-1893
Flora Walker, 1883-1884
Vicy Walker, 1871-1872
There are 11 graves at Hughett Cemetery marked with uninscribed field stones.
This story is part of the Scott County Cemetery Project.