Jobe (Tipton) Cemetery
2015
Washington County, Tennessee Tombstone Inscriptions by Charles M. Bennett and the Watauga Association of Genealogists. Information used with the permission of Lorraine Bennett Rae.
From volume 1, page 218 – WCCL
“JOBE – ¼ mi. from the center of Johnson City, at the junction of Spring and Maple Streets. Established by Tip Jobe. This is an old slave cemetery. Negro slaves are buried in this plot. It has been abandoned for several years. It is neglected and not taken care of. (Some of those buried here may have been moved to Westlawn.) ”
During the research and surveys of West Lawn and Roan Hill Cemeteries, no documentation was found to support any of the following theories. Brigadier General John T. Wilder (1830-1917) lived at the location noted below, known as lot 112. In 1887 he added to the western side of lot 112, by purchasing lots 109-111 from the Johnson City Real Estate Company – Deed Book 61, Page 339. The deed is quiet on any existence of a burial ground. This land is now mostly under parking lot pavement.
The newspaper article presented below seems to indicate that there were graves moved just a short distance towards Buffalo Street, and subsequent graves added. No proof of this has been found.
LOCATION – On or about 806 Spring Street, Johnson City. Washington County tax parcel 054DA-047.00 and/or parcel 054DA-049.00
GPS Location: Approximate at +36° 18.800, -82° 21.025
RESEARCH BY DR. DONALD SHAFFER:
JOBE SLAVE CEMETERY
Charles M. Bennett: Washington County Tennessee Tombstone Inscriptions, vol. 1 (1977), p. 218, notes the erstwhile existence of this cemetery. Those who prepared this volume were unable to find it, but they quote the following brief report of it from the Washington County Check List (1939):
¼ mi. from the center of Johnson City, at the junction of Spring & Maple Streets. Established by Tip Jobe. This is an old slave cemetery. Negro slaves are buried in this plot. It has been abandoned for several years. It is neglected and not taken care of. (Some of those buried here may have been moved to Westlawn [sic]).
The report is reasonably precise about the location of this cemetery, but not quite precise enough. Just how close was it to that intersection, and on which of its four corners?
I have heard it claimed that it was on the southwest corner, i.e. on the property now occupied by First United Methodist Church, and thus across Maple Street from the house which Gen. John T. Wilder built on the northwest corner in 1882 (which still stands there). I have even heard a rumor that Gen. Wilder had the graves moved from there because he did not want them to be visible from his house.
I find it very hard to believe that the Jobes’ slave cemetery was on the property now owned and occupied by the First United Methodist Church, or even that Gen. Wilder had the graves moved away from his home. The time frames involved simply do not fit.
If Gen. Wilder did have the graves of the slaves moved, he must have done so between 1882, when he built the house, and 1897, when he moved from Johnson City to Knoxville (Stahl, Greater Johnson City, A Pictorial History, p. 68). In that case, he did not move those graves to West Lawn Cemetery, because that cemetery did not open until 1902 – 5 years after Wilder moved away from Johnson City. He might have moved them to the old colored cemetery at the top of Roan Hill, on the east side of Buffalo Street. That cemetery did still exist during Wilder’s Johnson City years. It was closed about 1902, and I understand that the remains of people buried in it which could still be located were reinterred in the new West Lawn Cemetery. If any remains from the Jobe Cemetery were among those that could still be located atop Roan Hill, the remains of those slaves might have been moved a second time, to West Lawn.
If the slave cemetery was across Maple Street from the Wilders’ house, where the Methodist Church now stands, and if he moved it from there, he moved it long before the Methodist Church owned that property, since he moved away from Johnson City 30 years before the church bought that land (in 1927). (I have not researched who owned that land between 1882 and 1897. Possibly Wilder owned it then.)
But wait a minute. None of this works. The people who prepared this first volume of Bennett’s Tombstone Inscriptions (published in 1977) couldn’t find this cemetery. However, evidently the WPA workers who prepared the Washington County Check List in the mid or late 1930s (published in 1939) did find it. They located it at this corner, “¼ mi. from the center of Johnson City.” (I suppose their “center” of the city may have been Fountain Square.) They reported that it had been “abandoned for several years.” (Might it indeed have been abandoned for many years before, say, 1935?) They found it in a condition which they described as “neglected” and “not taken care of.”
Now the mid-1930s are more than 5 years after the Methodist Church building was erected on the southwest corner (in 1928), not to mention nearly 40 years after Gen. Wilder moved away from Johnson City. This makes it very hard for me to believe that the Jobes’ slave cemetery was removed by Wilder, let alone that it was on the property where the church now stands – since the WPA people found this slave cemetery well after that church was built.
If this cemetery was fairly close to that intersection, that leaves 3 possibilities for its location: the southeast corner, the northeast corner, or somewhere not far from Wilder’s house on the northwest corner. I might speculate (wildly) that if the WPA workers found what was still left of this cemetery on the Wilders’ corner lot, it might have been near the alley behind their house or near the alley beside their house. Might the Wilder family have done no more than disguise it with plantings of flowers and shrubs and trees? Or might they have masked it by simply letting trees and shrubs grow wild around it? (My guess is that the graves were never marked with gravestones, or at most with rough fieldstones without inscriptions. Or they might originally have had wooden markers, which would not have lasted a great many years. It is still possible to locate old graves if there are depressions where the earth above them has sunk in. And one or more persons still living in the mid-1930s might well have been able to show the WPA workers the location of this cemetery. Certainly someone must have informed them that the people buried there were slaves and that Tipton Jobe had established this slave cemetery. They surely didn’t just invent that information out of their own imaginations.)
Donald Shaffer, 22 November 2006
NEWSPAPER ARTICLE:
African-American Cemetery @ First Methodist Church Block
Johnson City, Tennessee
Johnson City Press-Chronicle, Sunday 5 April 1981
Thomas Matson, Jr. remembers a graveyard of black people. Mattson Senior allowed General Wilder to move some of the bodies of slaves from land where the First United Methodist Church now stands. Wilder wished to build a home across the street. Then, later on, 34 or 40 blacks died of typhoid fever while working on the ET&WNC Railroad, and Matson Senior permitted them to be buried in the graveyard which then was on land next to Buffalo Street.
Compiled and donated to the Washington County TNGen Web Sept 2015 by Gordon M. Edwards, member of the Cemetery Survey Team of Northeast Tennessee.
Copyrighted 2015 by the Cemetery Survey Team of Northeast Tennessee. No part of this work may be copied without written permission from the Cemetery Survey Team.