Sacred Ground: The mystery of the Thompson Fields Cemetery

Among all the secrets of this region’s history that old cemeteries hold, many of those old burial grounds have secrets guarded so closely that it will likely never be known exactly who is buried in some of the graves. And, as it turns out, a few cemeteries are so shrouded in mystery that it’s not even clear that people were buried there at all.

This is the story of the Thompson Fields Cemetery in the Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area — a cemetery that is actually a pet cemetery.

The cemetery is located on the banks of a small pond just a stone’s throw from S.R. 297 on the west side of the Big South Fork River gorge, near the turnoff to Bandy Creek. It is named for the field by which it is located. There were once several families who lived in this area along the main road between Leatherwood and White Pine, including Terrys, Burkes, Duvalls, Thompsons and others.

It is for Luther Thompson that the Thompson Fields were named. Located on the east side of Bandy Creek Road, only a small portion of the field nearest the road is kept cleared by the National Park Service. The decision was made several years ago to let the others be reclaimed by nature, and they’re currently in various stages of reforestation. But there was a time when these meadows extended all the way to the end of the ridge overlooking Leatherwood Ford and the river below.

Luther Thompson was a World War II veteran who lived on the west end of the field, by Bandy Creek Road. His home is no longer there, of course, and he died in 1998. (He’s buried at Possum Rock Cemetery on the other side of the river, as is his wife, Ivaglen, who died in 2009.)

Next-door to the Thompsons lived the Duvalls: Lonnie Duvall and his wife, Etta Dishman Duvall. One of their sons was Charles Duvall, the long-time manager of the Scott Farmers Co-Op. Scott County Airport manager Hank Duvall is their grandson. Across the road from the Duvalls and the Thompsons were the Terrys — James Elmer and his wife Juanita Cecil. And next-door to them lived a Burke family.

These families’ farms were among several others in this area around White Pine when the federal government bought up the territory for the establishment of the Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area in the 1970s. Most of the old fields are gone or soon will be. Some, like a portion of the Terry farm, haven’t been cleared in many years and are essentially new forests now. Others, like the Thompson Fields, have only been left to restoration for a few years and are covered in briars and vines.

There were several small ponds on these farms, used to provide water for livestock and other purposes. A couple of those small ponds were located in the Thompson Fields. They’re almost impossible to get to now without wading through briar-laden thickets, but the National Park Service periodically cuts trees from the earthen dams to prevent the roots from compromising the dams.

It is by the easternmost of these two ponds in the Thompson Fields that the small cemetery is located, along an unassuming flat spot in the forest just a few feet away from the pond. There are about six graves here, all marked with field stones.

Historian Robert Bailey listed the graveyard in his 1994 book, Cemeteries of Scott County, Tennessee. He noted at the time that three of the stones were marked with “P,” “W” and “+” (a cross symbol).

Thirty years later, a deeply-engraved “W” is weathered but still plainly visible on one of the stones. Any inscriptions on the other stones, however, have been lost to time.

We turned to Big South Fork Ranger Kristy Slaven for help pinpointing the cemetery. Like many current and past employees of the Big South Fork NRRA, her ancestors were among the early families who settled the park and she knows a lot about the history of the region.

It was Slaven who first said that it is rumored that this small cemetery in the Thompson Fields was used to bury pets.

In the quest to confirm this information, we next turned to Michael Terry. Mike and his wife, Benissa, live in Oneida. But he grew up at White Pine, across the road from the Thompson Fields. He is the youngest of 14 children of James Elmer and Juanita Terry, who owned the farm that can be found in various stages of reforestation on the south side of S.R. 297 at the top of the hill, across from the Bandy Creek turnoff. Like so many other residents of White Pine, James and Juanita Terry are both buried at Possum Rock — or Black Oak Cemetery, as it is also called. (More on the Terry family in next week’s installment of the Sacred Ground series.)

Like Ranger Kristy Slaven, Mike Terry knows much of the history of the area from the days before the national park was established. Both his father and his mother drove the school bus across the old low-water bridge at Leatherwood to transport children from White Pine to Oneida for school, and his father was a Sunday school superintendent and clerk at White Pine United Baptist Church.

Terry posed the question of the Thompson Fields Cemetery to some of his family, and there the mystery was solved: with Delmer Thompson.

Delmer Thompson lives on Coopertown Road in Oneida. He grew up at White Pine. His parents, George and Bessie Thompson, owned a home near the Thompson Fields. He married another of James and Juanita Terry’s 14 children, Sue Dean, who passed in 2016.

Delmer confirmed that the small grave stones by the pond are indeed marking pets’ graves. The stone engraved with the “W” that can still clearly be made out was his pet dog Watch. Also buried there, he told Mike Terry, were pets named Penny and Tiger. (Remember, when Robert Bailey transcribed the cemetery in 1994 he found a “P” on one stone and what he believed to be a “+” on another. As it turns out, the “+” was actually a lower-case “t,” for Tiger.)

As Delmer Thompson recalls, the pets would have been buried sometime around the year 1947.

It is a fascinating history lesson of the White Pine area . . . and one that is just beginning, as we’ll visit another cemetery in the area and explore another mystery next week. These are stories that harken back to the days when the Thompsons and the Duvalls and the Terrys were just young kids, roaming the ridges of White Pine above the Big South Fork River — an area that we know today as the Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area, but an area that they knew as home.

Foot Note: There are dozens of cemeteries found in the Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area, the largest of which we have profiled as part of the “Sacred Ground” series. Many of the smaller cemeteries consist of only a few graves, and little is known about several of these cemeteries. Some of these small cemeteries will be featured in this series in the future. However, we have so far been unsuccessful in locating some of the cemeteries that have been documented in the national park, including the Stevens Cemetery on the Big South Fork River near Station Camp, a cemetery on the river by the John Hawk Smith Place, and a cemetery off Bandy Creek Road near the Scott-Fentress county line. If you’re familiar with the location of any of these three cemeteries and can help pinpoint them, please email us at newsroom@ihoneida.com.

This story is part of the Scott County Cemetery Project.