The site of the French Cemetery lies east of Trousdale and just east and north of the Trousdale Community Center and north of Old Shelbyville Road in Warren County Tennessee. It is in an overgrown thicket on a bluff on the south bank of the Barren Fork River. Walter Womack wrote: There are probably 1,000 graves there in this cemetery and a number of them are the early members of the Caney Branch Church.*
     The French Cemetery was used for both white and colored people. The whites were buried in the front of the cemetery and the colored in the rear.*
     Only a few headstones remain today. Two box graves, early rough stone enclosures, are to be found there, but are in ruins. The underbrush has recently been removed and many sunken graves are barely visible. If there ever was 1,000 or so people interred there, their graves for the most part are lost. The most notable remaining headstones are those of “Elder” A. R. Hammer (Asahel Rains Hammer, d. 1879) and Daniel West (d. 1860). Daniel West lived in the hollow of a poplar tree in a canebrake along the river below the cemetery and rode a white steer. When Daniel West died he was carried up the hill to the French Cemetery and laid to rest.*



* Walter Womack, McMinnville at a Milestone, 1810-1960. Published jointly by the Standard Publishing Co. Inc. and Womack Printing Co., both of McMinnville Tennessee, 1960, p. 207.

Notes:
Gravemarker readings for French Cemetery may be found in: Warren County, Tennessee Cemetery Book 1. by Mrs. Almetia Cunningham and Mrs. Martha Holt, compiled and edited by Mrs. Betty M. Majors, 1993

Trousdale was formerly known as Jacksboro.

Latitude/Longitude (Degrees, minutes, seconds):
35° 40' 12"N, 85° 55' 36"W