Culture of Marion County, Tennessee

Cumberland View Cemetery

The largest cemetery in Marion County, on the Sequatchie Valley floor at Kimball

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Last updated: May 6, 2026

Judge John T. Raulston of Marion County in 1925, the year he presided over the Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee; he is buried at Cumberland View Cemetery in Kimball
Judge John T. Raulston of Marion County, photographed in 1925, the year he presided over the Scopes Monkey Trial. Raulston was born in 1868 in the Bean-Roulston family country of Sweeden's Cove, served as judge of the Eighteenth Tennessee Circuit, and is buried at Cumberland View Cemetery in Kimball. Photograph from press coverage of the Scopes Trial, 1925, public domain.

Setting

Cumberland View Cemetery sits on the floor of the lower Sequatchie Valley in Kimball, at the corner of Kimball Crossing Drive and Main Street, the local name for U.S. 72 through the town. The cemetery has two entrances, one on Kimball Crossing Drive on the west side and one on Main Street on the north, and a section of the historic stone wall that once enclosed the grounds still stands at the entrance. The view from the gates looks south down the valley toward South Pittsburg, with the Cumberland Plateau escarpment walling the valley to the west and northwest. The cemetery's name comes from that view of the plateau rim.

The cemetery is on the United States Geological Survey topographic map at the South Pittsburg quadrangle, at coordinates 35.044° N, 85.682° W, on the same valley floor that holds the I-24 and U.S. 72 commercial junction at Kimball's modern center. Find a Grave's restrictive policy on photo additions and photo requests for this cemetery indicates an active management entity controls the grounds; the management body is not publicly named on either Find a Grave or any of the local-history sources surveyed for this page.

Scale and role

Cumberland View is the single largest cemetery in Marion County by recorded memorial count. The Find a Grave roster lists about 3,003 memorials, almost twice the number at Pine Grove in Jasper and nearly nine times the count at Mount Olive above Whitwell. Ninety-four percent of the memorials carry a photograph, the highest documentation rate among the county's large cemeteries. The cemetery serves the modern community along the lower Sequatchie corridor, drawing burials from Kimball, South Pittsburg, Richard City, and New Hope, and remains in active use, with interments documented through 2025.

The cemetery's scale reflects the geography of the four-town cluster at the lower end of the Sequatchie Valley. South Pittsburg's Old City Cemetery below Whiteacre Point recorded its last burial in 1975, and as the older town cemetery filled or fell out of regular use the natural successor for a 20th-century community burial ground in the lower valley was a site at the geographic center of the cluster. Cumberland View, on the I-24 and U.S. 72 hub at Kimball, became that successor; its memorial count is the cumulative record of nearly a century of valley deaths.

Judge John T. Raulston, the Scopes Trial judge

The cemetery's best-known burial is Judge John Tate Raulston (September 22, 1868 to July 11, 1956), the Marion County jurist who presided over the Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton in July 1925. Raulston was born on a small farm in Sweeden's Cove and was a member of the same Raulston family whose cenotaph stands at the Bean-Roulston Graveyard, the family burying ground twelve miles to the west of Kimball. He attended U.S. Grant University, the predecessor of Tennessee Wesleyan College, and the University of Chattanooga, was admitted to the bar in 1896, served in the Tennessee state legislature, and ran unsuccessfully for the United States House as a Republican in 1908. In 1918 he was elected judge of the Eighteenth Tennessee Circuit, which included Rhea County and the courthouse at Dayton.

In July 1925 Raulston obtained the grand-jury indictment against the high school teacher John Scopes for violating the Tennessee Butler Act, which had forbidden the teaching of evolution in the state's public schools. He opened proceedings with prayer, quoted the Butler Act and the first chapter of Genesis, barred testimony from theological and natural-science experts, and clashed repeatedly with Clarence Darrow during the trial, citing Darrow for contempt at one point before accepting an apology and dropping the contempt charge. He moved the trial outdoors to the courthouse lawn after engineers warned that the weight of the spectator crowd might collapse the courtroom floor. Scopes was convicted and fined one hundred dollars; the Tennessee Supreme Court later reversed the verdict on a procedural technicality, holding that the maximum fine should have been set by the jury rather than the judge. Raulston was defeated for reelection in 1926, lectured on the legal aspects of fundamentalism, ran unsuccessfully for governor of Tennessee, and practiced law with the firm of Raulston, Raulston, and Swafford until his death in South Pittsburg in 1956. Late in his life he modified his stated position on the underlying question and said that the state should not pass laws limiting the teaching of science.

The trial has been retold so often in print and on screen, including in Inherit the Wind in its 1955 stage version and the 1960, 1965, 1988, and 1999 film and television adaptations, that the lightly fictionalized "Judge Merle Coffey" of those works is now better known to most readers than the actual Marion County judge buried in Kimball. Several of Raulston's siblings rest beside him at Cumberland View, including his brother Dr. Joseph Lancaster Raulston I (1877 to 1954), who was the father of the silent-film actress Jobyna Lancaster Raulston (1899 to 1967), known professionally as Jobyna Ralston, and his brother Samuel Houston Raulston (1870 to 1958). The Raulston family burial cluster at Cumberland View extends to more than twenty memorials across at least three generations.

Master Sergeant Raymond H. Cooley, Medal of Honor

Cumberland View also holds the grave of Master Sergeant Raymond Henry Cooley (May 7, 1916 to March 12, 1947), the Medal of Honor recipient from the Richard City and South Pittsburg corridor. Cooley was born in Dunlap in adjoining Sequatchie County and entered United States Army service from Richard City in September 1941. He was a platoon guide in Company B, 27th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division, in the Pacific theater of the Second World War.

On February 24, 1945, near Lumboy on Luzon in the Philippines, Cooley led an assault on a camouflaged Japanese entrenchment defended by machine guns, rifles, and mortars. He silenced one machine-gun position with hand grenades and was advancing toward a second when six Japanese soldiers rushed him as he held an armed grenade. Throwing it would have wounded his comrades fighting at close quarters with the enemy, so Cooley covered the grenade with his own body. He survived the blast, one of a small number of Medal of Honor recipients who fell on a grenade and lived. He was promoted to master sergeant after the action. President Harry S. Truman presented the medal to him at the White House on August 23, 1945.

Cooley returned to Tennessee after the war, suffered lasting effects from his combat wounds, and died in a single-vehicle accident on Marion County roads on March 12, 1947, at the age of thirty, less than two years after the White House ceremony. Tennessee Highway 28 between Jasper and Interstate 24 carries his name as the Raymond H. Cooley Highway. The cemetery's record places his grave at coordinates 35.0432° N, 85.6814° W, a few feet from Judge Raulston's plot.

Other notable burials

The cemetery's other named burials reflect the breadth of the lower-valley community over a century. William James Lodge (1856 to 1937), born in Pennsylvania, and his wife Elizabeth Watham Frame Lodge (1865 to 1940) are buried here, part of the Lodge family that came from the Pennsylvania foundry country to South Pittsburg in the late nineteenth century. The Lodge connection at Cumberland View is to the broader family rather than to Joseph Lodge himself, who founded Lodge Cast Iron in 1896 and is buried at the Patton Annex Cemetery in South Pittsburg. Their son Richard Leslie Lodge (1883 to 1966) and his wife Elizabeth Masefield Lodge (1888 to 1983), born in Cheadle, Staffordshire, England, are also buried at Cumberland View. Find a Grave's bio for Elizabeth Masefield Lodge calls her a poet.

Twentieth-century veteran burials are extensive. Seaman Second Class Clay Lee Kilgore (1924 to 1945) died at twenty-one in the closing year of the Second World War. Toffield D. Holmes (1844 to 1937) is one of several Civil War-era births in the cemetery, with a veteran flag in the Find a Grave roster. The Cooley family burial cluster around the Medal of Honor recipient includes Benjamin Lewis Cooley (1887 to 1957), Christeen Branch Cooley (1912 to 1975), and other kin. The full roster across all wars from the late nineteenth century through Vietnam runs to roughly five percent of all burials, the typical share for a southern community cemetery.

Dominant families

Surname distribution at Cumberland View tracks its role as the modern lower-valley community burying ground rather than a single-family cemetery. The Raulston family is the largest single presence, with at least twenty-one memorials including Judge John T. Raulston, his brother Dr. Joseph Lancaster Raulston I, and three or more later generations. The Kilgore family follows with at least seventeen, the same family that is also one of the dominant presences at Mount Olive Cemetery above Whitwell. Other large surname groups include Hookey, Carter, Garland, Ware, Ables, Birdwell, Adcock, and Beene, with the Beene presence connecting Cumberland View to the same Bean and Beene family network that anchors Bean-Roulston Graveyard in the western cove. The Lodge, Cooley, Spencer, and Bible families also appear at notable counts, the Bible family connecting to the Raulston cluster through marriage in the late nineteenth century.

Related

Kimball →
Judge John T. Raulston →
Raymond H. Cooley, Medal of Honor →
Jobyna Ralston →
Bean-Roulston Graveyard, the Raulston family seat →
Cemeteries of Marion County →

Sources