Range (Peter) Cemetery
1999
Located near the intersection of Springbrook Drive and Oakland Avenue, Johnson City, Tennessee. A new office complex has been built next the cemetery.
GPS Location: 36°21.29 N 082°22.35 W
Our Sister, Louisa Range, Born Aug 26, 1823, Died Feby __ 1884. [H.C. Remine, Limestone, Tenn. was the maker of this marker]
In Memory of Our Father, [Jacob] Range, Born Jan 9, 1790, Died Oct 15, 1876, Aged 86y, 9 mo., & 6d.
Range (Peter) Cemetery
2017
Our Mother, Susan Range, Born Sept 1795 and died Apr 29, 1870, Aged 74 yrs. 5mo. & 29 days
Benn Harrison Shipley, Born June 23, 1891, Died Aug 28, 1897
P RANGE D, Oct 10, 1817
In 1957 another marker was recorded: R.H. Shipley, March 27, 1834-May 31, 1887
Surveyed, transcribed and donated to the Washington County TNGen Web January 1999 by Robert D. & Betty Jane Hylton members of the Cemetery Survey Team of Northeast Tennessee.
Copyrighted 2013 by the Cemetery Survey Team of Northeast Tennessee. No part of this work may be copied without written permission from the Cemetery Survey Team.
Additional information:
History of Washington County Tennessee, 1988, by the Watuaga Association of Genealogists, p. 155:
The Peter Range, Sr. House is located at 2833 East Oakland Avenue, Johnson City (lower Knob Creek). The house is of stone exterior and interior walls with the stone chimney at either end of the house. There are four fireplaces. The full basement shows evidence of having been used as part of the original house. The frame additions, built at a much later date, hide the original character of the house. The Range Cemetery is about 150 feet from the rear of the house. Peter Range, Sr. and other members of the Range family were buried in this cemetery.
Peter Range, Sr. (1749-1817) of German descent, was born in Somerset County, New Jersey. His wife was Elizabeth Ronimus. Peter and Elizabeth came to Washington County after the birth of their first child, Elizabeth Range, born 1777, who married Jacob Miller. Peter purchased land from Pharoah Cobb and built their first home, a two-story log structure. He later purchased land from John Engle, Solomon Hendrix, Abraham Cox, John Hammer and Samuel Denton. On the properly purchased form John Hammer in 1804, he built the present stone house and girst mill. The house is one of the few remaining three-floor homes of the early 19th Century.
More information on the Range family can be found in this publication.
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Additional information from Ronald Akers:
In his 1951 book, Ancestral Sketches, LeRoy Reeves* described the Range Cemetery as follows:
“I visited the cemetery in 1913. It was in a meadow, on a knoll above a ledge of rocks,
about 100 yards south-east of the house [the Peter Range Sr. stone house] , inclosed [sic] by a dilapidated fence, and considerably grown up in saplings and thorn-bushes. The older part of the cemetery consisted of three rows of graves, twenty-five in all, mostly marked by unlettered limestone headstones. The grave of Peter Range was fourth from the south in the second row; that of his wife [Elizabeth Ronimus by oral history] to his left. In the third or easterly row, in order, beginning at the south, were marble tombstones of Louisa G.[should be E. for Elizabeth] Range (1823-1884), Jacob Range [son Peter Sr.] (1790-1876) and Susan [or Susannah] [Hale] Range (1790-1870), parents and daughter [should be daughter and parents], and beyond them three graves understood to be those of the triplet children [Elizabeth and two others, b.20 Feb 1818] of Jacob and Susan Range.
I visited the place again in 1947. The cemetery fence was gone, the cemetery grown up and trampled by cattle, the marble tombstones broken in pieces and scattered. There among the forgotten graves of his contemporaries and the fragments of the monuments of his descendants the small headstone of Peter Range [Sr.] still stood bravely as it had stood for more than a hundred years; where one might kneel and with difficulty decipher the crude lettering: P. Range, Oct. 10, 1817, In Memory.”
I [Ronald L. Akers] visited the cemetery in October 1998 and copied the following add differences which could be added to the website, they are:
a. For Lousia Range: her date of death was 11 Feb 1884 and that her stone had the following inscription: “In life loved, in death lamented” H.C.Bowman, Limestone, Tenn.
b. For Susan Range: same change of death date as above.
c. For Benjamin Harrison Shipley: that his stone had the following inscription: “Adieu’ Untill [sic] we meet again”
Notes:
[ ] notations by the submitter, Ronald L. Akers, 21061 Vandenberg Ave., Riverside, CA 92518-2889, 909-567-5978, rlmlakers@earthlink.net Grx3 Gdson of Peter Sr.
* The Reeves line appears to have married into the DeVault family which married in early times with the Range family, RLA.