Trammell Cemetery (Jellico Creek)
Last week, the “Sacred Ground” series visited Houk Trammell Cemetery in the Alderville area east of Winfield. Among the many Trammells buried there is Capt. Dennis Trammell, the Revolutionary War veteran who moved to present-day Winfield after the war and became the forefather of the Trammell family that is still very prevalent on the north end of Scott County today.
This week, we return to the mountainous terrain east of Winfield, but make the drive across the mountain from Dennis Trammell’s burial place to the second of three Trammell Cemeteries in the area. This one is located in a very remote setting off Jellico Creek Road in the Gum Fork area, and it dates back to just after the Civil War.
The Trammell Cemetery on Jellico Creek was once well cared for. These days, it has been many years since the cemetery was active, and it is infrequently maintained — kept free of overgrowth but mowed only perhaps once a year or every other year.
Getting to the Trammell Cemetery requires driving a seldom-used, single-lane dirt road for a ways and fording Jellico Creek. It’s a journey that doesn’t require a four-wheel-drive vehicle, but it’s also a journey you wouldn’t want to make in the family sedan.
Once you’ve climbed the hill to Trammell Cemetery, the first thing you notice is just how many graves are packed into a small plot that is roughly half an acre or so in size. This was a very active cemetery in its day, with nearly 70 people buried here.
The second thing that stands out is that there aren’t many unmarked or unidentifiable graves. That was very unusual in the 19th century, especially in the remote settlements of Scott County. It was common for graves to be marked with field stones, often without inscriptions. But only one grave at Trammell Cemetery is marked with a field stone; all the others have commercial stones. That may speak to the relatively well-to-do status of the Trammell family that settled here.
The Trammell Family
Dennis Trammell, the Revolutionary War veteran who moved to Winfield in the early 1800s, settled in the Pleasant Grove area, and many of his descendants remained in that part of the area through the years. But some wound up a little further east, on Jellico Creek, and still further east, on Capachine Creek. This is the story of those who ventured further into the mountains.
As detailed in last week’s story, one of Capt. Trammell’s daughters, Nancy Ann, married Archibald Angel before the move to Scott County, and that was the start of the Trammell family on Jellico Creek. Arch and Nancy Angel established a large farm there that became known as Angel Valley and is still known as that today.
Both Arch and Nancy Angel are buried at the Angel-Wright Cemetery on the old farm. Also buried there is Nancy’s brother, James Trammell, who died in 1826. In fact, his headstone is the oldest identifiable headstone in Scott County.
James Trammell’s oldest son — named Dennis Trammell, after his grandfather who brought the family to present-day Scott County — was born in 1815. He owned the next farm up Jellico Creek, and that’s where he and many other members of his family were buried, in what became the Trammell Cemetery on Jellico Creek.
Like his grandfather, Dennis Trammell was a captain, serving in Co. A of the 1st East Tennessee National Guard. He married Polly Baker, of another prominent early family in the Capuchine area, and they had at least 13 children.
During the Civil War, Confederate guerrillas raided Jellico Creek and burned Trammell’s home because he was a Union officer. He was gone from home at the time. The soldiers allowed Polly, who was blind, to be led from the home before they torched it. The family spent the winter in a cave on Jellico Creek before a new home could be built the following spring.
Dennis and Polly’s first-born child was daughter Eliza Jane, born in 1835, when her father was 20 and her mother was 24. She was followed by Millie, James, Marion, Armilda, William, Rachel, Ewell, Scott, Rheuminta, Hugh, Andrew, and Mary Ann, the youngest, who was born in 1868.
Polly Trammell died in 1873. Dennis Trammell subsequently remarried to Vina Bowling in 1873. Following her death in 1886, he married Pherbia Hughett in 1890.
The Cemetery Begins
The Trammell Cemetery was founded in 1869, when Dennis and Polly’s 22-year-old daughter, Rachel, died and was buried on the hill above the family farm. She had been the sixth of the 13 children and was named after her grandmother.
Two years later, in 1871, Dennis Trammell’s mother, Rachel Starks Trammell, died and was buried beside her granddaughter. Some 45 years had passed since her husband, James, died in 1826. Rachel never remarried, but family history has it that she gave birth to a child fathered by Bob Baker, who lived nearby.
Polly Trammell, the first wife of Dennis Trammell, was the third person buried at the family cemetery when she died in 1873. That same year, Marion Trammell — her son — was buried at the cemetery when he died at age 35. One thing that is interesting about the cemetery is that the stones of siblings Rachel and Marion Trammell, their mother Polly Trammell, and their grandmother Rachel Starks Trammell, are all fashioned the same way, as are the stones of other members of the Trammell family buried at the cemetery.
One of those others is another of the Trammell children who died relatively young. Scott Trammell, whose full name was Dennis Winfield Scott Trammell, after the War of 1812 military leader who Scott County and the Town of Winfield were both named for, died in December 1882 at the age of 32.
He married a Kentucky woman, Margarett Emeline Murphey, in 1869 and they had one child. She moved back to Kentucky after Scott’s death.
Over the next several years, three children were buried at the family cemetery on Jellico Creek. The first was baby Susia Trammell, who was less than a week old when she died in October 1884. Next was Lenard Trammell, who died on his fourth birthday in 1885. Then came Enoch Marion Robinson, who was one year old when he died in July 1885.
Little Enoch was the son of James Robinson and Hannah Trammell. He was a great-grandson of Dennis Trammell. His grandmother was Eliza Jane Trammell, the oldest of Dennis Trammell’s children. It is not clear who the parents were of Susia and Lenard Trammell, though it stands to reason that they were siblings and probably also great-grandchildren of Dennis Trammell.
The Cemetery Continues To Grow
In February 1886, Hugh Davis died and was buried at the cemetery. He was the husband of Dorcas Trammell — the daughter of Rachel Starks Trammell and a half-sister to Dennis Trammell; the child whose father may have been Bob Baker.
The family history here isn’t clear, but there is evidence to suggest that Hugh and Dorcas divorced, even though he was buried in the family cemetery. When she was buried there in 1913, the name “Dorcas Trammell” — not Davis — was inscribed on her stone. Additionally, census records indicate that she had children by Caswell Cross, who is buried at the nearby Cross Cemetery.
Just two days shy of a month after Hugh Davis died, his sister, Martha “Patsy” Davis, also died and was buried at the cemetery.
That same year, Viney Bowling Trammell died and was buried at the cemetery. She was the second wife of Dennis Trammell.
Infant Mary Bell Trammell, the daughter of William Trammell and Phebe Brown, and a granddaughter of Dennis Trammell, died and was buried at the cemetery in 1887. Her mother was the next to be buried at the cemetery when she died three years later.
Burials continued to mount quickly at the cemetery. Jane Davis — whom little is known about — died in April 1891 and was buried there, and Dennis Trammell died just a couple of months later, on June 16, 1891.
Later that same year, Maggie May Chitwood was buried at the cemetery. She was the two-year-old daughter of Jarrett “J. C.” Chitwood and Lucinda Chitwood. She was a granddaughter of Pleasant Chitwood Jr., who is buried at the Chitwood Cemetery further up Jellico Creek and was a second-great-granddaughter of Revolutionary War veteran James Chitwood.
Other burials in the 1890s included infant Walter Trammell, Eliza Jane Trammell Robinson, Hugh Trammell — who was one of the sons of Dennis Trammell — and six-month-old Alonzo Chitwood, the brother of Maggie May Chitwood.
Nearly 10 years elapsed between baby Alonzo Chitwood’s death in 1897 and the next burial at the cemetery in 1907. That was the burial of his sister, 16-year-old Maude Chitwood. After that, Hugh Davis Jr. died in 1907 (and his mother, Dorcas Trammell, died in 1913), and 11-month-old Scott Trammell Jr. died in 1908.
The Lovett Family
A single row of stones near the bottom of the Trammell Cemetery marks the graves of several members of the Lovett family that lived on Jellico Creek.
James Marion Lovett (1849-1917) was originally from McCreary County but married into the Trammell family. He was married to Rheuminta Trammell, one of the younger children of Dennis Trammell who went by “Mintie.” She was his second wife. His first wife, Sarah Blankenship, died in 1893, and he married Mintie in 1896. For whatever reason, he was buried at the Angel-Wright Cemetery down the creek when he died in 1917 (perhaps because that’s where his first wife was buried). But several other members of his family are buried at Trammell Cemetery, including Mintie.
The first Lovett buried at the cemetery was James Marion’s baby granddaughter, Myrtle Lovett, who died in 1914. She was the daughter of Ransom Lovett and Hester Trammell. Hester was the daughter of William Trammell, a granddaughter of Dennis Trammell and a niece of Mintie Trammell Lovett.
Joseph Lovett, James Marion’s 21-year-old son, died in 1918 and was buried at the cemetery. After that there were several Lovett children buried there: newborn Linnie Lovett in 1918, a newborn in 1919, infant Paul in 1922, and two-year-old Willie in 1922. Linnie, the unnamed newborn, and Paul were all the children of Ransom and Hester Lovett. Willie was the son of George Dewey Lovett and Pearl Chitwood. George Dewey was a brother to Ransom Lovett. He died and was buried at the cemetery in March 1923, less than a year after his son’s death.
Meanwhile, Ransom and Hester Lovett lost yet another child in 1923 when five-month-old Mary died and was buried at the cemetery. In just five years, they buried four of their young children at the family cemetery.
Another Lovett child, Loureen, died just weeks later, in July 1923. It isn’t clear who her parents were.
Mintie Trammell Lovett was the last Lovett to be buried at the cemetery in 1954.
Another Tragedy
Ransom and Hester Lovett buried four of their children at the Trammell Cemetery over a five-year span from 1918 and 1923. A similar set of tragic deaths played out a little less than a decade later. In the lower part of the cemetery, there are a series of children’s graves, side-by-side: infant Ruth Trammell died in 1930; infant Rosetta Trammell died in 1932; infant Junior Trammell died in 1934; newborn Drema Trammell died in 1935; Ruby Trammell died in 1938 at the age of eight.
These five children were all the children of Lee Trammell and Amy Cross. Lee was the son of Andrew Johnson Trammell, and a grandson of Dennis Trammell. Ann was the daughter of Louverna Cross. Little Ruth was just three months old when she died in 1930. Her twin sister, Ruby, survived — only to die in 1938. Rosetta was four months old when she died in 1932. Junior was two months old when he died in 1934. Drema died as a newborn in 1935. It should be noted that records don’t typically list Rosetta as a daughter of Lee and Amy Trammell. However, her stone is identical to the others, and among them.
What’s more, these five children weren’t the only children that Lee and Amy lost. Their oldest, Hettie Trammell, died at the age of five in 1922 and was buried at the cemetery. Three years before that, infant Loy Trammell was just three weeks old when he died three days before Christmas.
In all, Lee and Amy Trammell buried seven of their children at the cemetery. However, they had several other children to survive to adulthood. The last, Alice Monesmith, died in 2017 at the age of 91.
The Cemetery Today
Burials at the Trammell Cemetery largely ceased just after World War II, about 80 years after the cemetery began. Charity Trammell was one of the last to be buried there in 1946. She was the wife of Andrew Johnson Trammell; the grandmother of Lee Trammell’s many children buried in the cemetery.
In 1947, 44-year-old Homer Douglas was buried at the cemetery. He was the son of John Sampson Douglas and Eliza Jane Trammell. Eliza Jane was a niece to Dennis Trammell, the daughter of Jacob Trammell. She was buried at the cemetery in 1944. John Sampson died in 1949 and was also buried there.
Following Mintie Lovett’s death in 1954, nearly 20 years elapsed before newborn Warren Travis Anderson was buried at the cemetery in 1971. He was the son of Willis Anderson and Anna King.
After that, it was more than a quarter of a century before the final burial took place at the cemetery. In 1997, James Edison Chitwood was the last person buried there. He was the son of Maxwell Chitwood and Ella Angel. His grandparents were Jarrett and Lucinda Chitwood. Ella Angel was a second great-granddaughter of Arch and Nancy Trammell Angel.