Culture of Marion County, Tennessee

Old City Cemetery, South Pittsburg

An integrated antebellum-and-after burial ground below Whiteacre Point

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Last updated: May 6, 2026

Cedar Avenue in South Pittsburg, Tennessee, 1924, the historic main street of the town that the Old City Cemetery serves
Cedar Avenue, the main street of South Pittsburg, in 1924. The Old City Cemetery sits on the mountainside above the town and holds the founding generations of the families who built it. Photograph circa 1924, public domain.

Setting

Old City Cemetery, also called simply City Cemetery, sits on a mountainside below Whiteacre Point on the south side of South Pittsburg Mountain. The former McReynolds High School gymnasium, the only surviving building of the high school and now used as a storage building, stands directly downhill from the cemetery near the eastern edge of downtown South Pittsburg. The ground covers more than twenty acres of slope. The South Pittsburg Historic Preservation Society describes the site as somewhat isolated, a fact that has shaped its long pattern of falling into overgrowth and being reclaimed by successive cleanup campaigns.

The cemetery is not marked on the United States Geological Survey topographic maps and does not carry a Geographic Names Information System feature identifier. That gap is consistent with its status as an in-town burial ground rather than a rural family or church cemetery, and the absence is itself part of why the site needed local rediscovery and mapping work in the late 1990s and again after 2004. Wrought-iron fence sections still stand around several family plots, some of them warped by fallen trees, and the two oldest graves, both dated 1840, are covered with hand-hewn limestone-block burial vaults capped by sandstone headstones nearly six feet tall.

Founding and the Haley graves of 1840

Old City Cemetery dates to at least 1840 and so predates the formal founding of South Pittsburg by more than three decades. The two oldest documented burials, both from 1840, anchor the ground: John C. Haley Sr., born February 7, 1777, who died on September 3, 1840, and Eliza Jane Haley, born June 19, 1809, who died on October 10, 1840, thirty-seven days after John. Both rest under the same antebellum vault treatment, and other members of the Haley family are buried nearby, including John C. Haley Jr. (1799 to 1870). The pre-Civil War deaths preserve a settler presence below Whiteacre Point that almost no other surface site in South Pittsburg still records.

The cemetery's earliest decades are sparsely documented because most of the original markers are now lost, broken, or unreadable, but the burial dates of people whose stones have survived show continuous use through the antebellum period. Several individuals born in the 1820s through the 1840s are buried here, including the Swiss-born Melchior Geborene Zwald Sr. (1821 to 1888) and the German-born Matthias Dietzen (born at Trier in 1843, died 1900). The cemetery was the burying ground for the founding generation of the town and the iron-trade community that English investors built around it after 1875.

The Bowron family and the founding of South Pittsburg

The cemetery's most historically significant burials belong to the Bowron family, the English Quakers who founded South Pittsburg as the planned industrial center of a London iron syndicate. James Bowron Sr., born in England in 1814, came to the United States in 1873 as the land scout for the Southern States Coal, Iron and Land Company and spent two years searching the upland South for sites with the iron, coal, and ore deposits the syndicate needed. He chose the river valley below Whiteacre Point in 1875 and used the same land purchases to lay out South Pittsburg, Whitwell, and Victoria. He died on November 30, 1877, at the age of sixty-three, and was buried in the cemetery he had chosen for the town he had founded.

Other Bowrons in the cemetery include William Moss Bowron (1840 to 1921), a son of the founder and a co-founder of South Pittsburg in his own right whose middle name carried his mother Mary Hannah Moss's surname, his wife Mary Reeve Bowron (1848 to 1913), and several Bowron children who died young. Per the South Pittsburg Historic Preservation Society, a section of the cemetery near the lower end carries a large common stone marking the Bowron graves. James Bowron Jr., the son who became chairman of Gulf States Steel Corporation and is the subject of the Wikipedia article on the family name, is buried in Birmingham, Alabama, not in Old City Cemetery, though he and the founder moved together from England to South Pittsburg in 1875.

Integrated by race, religion, and Civil War side

Old City Cemetery is unusual among Southern town cemeteries of its period in that the burial ground was never subdivided by race, religion, wealth, or wartime allegiance. The South Pittsburg Historic Preservation Society's account of the site emphasizes this directly: the cemetery includes Black and white burials interspersed without a separate section, members of multiple denominations buried together rather than in segregated sections, immigrants from Switzerland, Germany, and England buried alongside Tennessee-native households, and veterans from both the Union and Confederate armies in the same ground. The integration is documented in the burial roster rather than asserted from policy: the surnames, military annotations, and birth places of the people interred here together describe a community that was structurally diverse from the start.

The cemetery's Black burials include several veterans of segregated United States Army units. The 1986 community transcription records Reverda Edge (1895 to 1927) as a corporal of the 804th Pioneer Infantry, a Black labor regiment that served in France during the First World War; Jesse Osborne (died 1941) as a sergeant of the same regiment; and George P. Merriman (1888 to 1947) as a private first class of the 9th Cavalry, one of the four segregated Black Buffalo Soldier regiments. Their burial in the same ground as the white founders of the town, with no separate section, is what the local sources mean by integration.

The cemetery's Confederate veterans include John Tipton Womack (1829 to 1908), a 2nd Alabama Infantry soldier who guarded the defenses at Fort Morgan near Mobile in 1861 and 1862, and Addison Isaac Tuder (1837 to 1897) of the 2nd Tennessee. The community transcription identifies several Union-side veterans in the same ground without separate marking. The two armies that had fought each other in the gorge less than fifteen miles upstream are buried together here.

Immigrant burials

The European immigrant presence in the cemetery comes out of South Pittsburg's recruitment of skilled iron and stove workers from Switzerland, Germany, and the British Isles in the decades after 1875. The Baumgartner family, with at least nine memorials, traces to the Swiss-born John Baumgartner (1829 to 1883) and his wife Anna Baumgartner (1829 to 1892), both born in Switzerland. The Zwald family, with five memorials, traces to the Swiss-born Melchior Geborene Zwald Sr. (1821 to 1888) and three of his sons. Other named immigrants include the German-born Matthias Dietzen (Trier, Germany, 1843 to 1900), the Swiss-born Rudolph Henry Scharer (1849 to 1903), and John Wilson (born Stockton-on-Tees, England, 1852, died at Birmingham, Alabama, 1886). These households were buried alongside Tennessee-native families in the same ground, in the pattern the local sources describe as integration by nationality.

Dominant families

The Find a Grave roster of five hundred ninety-seven memorials is led by the Smith family with seventeen, the Harris family with thirteen, and the Birdwell family with twelve. Other large surname presences include Marbury (eleven), Baumgartner, Link, McGhee, and Thompson (nine each), and Merriman (eight, including the Buffalo Soldier veteran George P. Merriman). The Bowron, Downing, Jarrett, Raulston, and Towles families each appear five or six times, with the Bowron presence carrying disproportionate historical weight because of the town's founding generation. Over twenty additional surnames have between three and five memorials, and the cemetery's documented total of about 1,600 burials means the great majority of stones are now lost or unreadable.

Infant and child mortality is striking in the surviving record. Several families appear in the roster primarily through children who died within a year or two of birth: multiple Carter children of the same parents, multiple Aycock children, the Brewer family, and infants in the Townsend, Mason, and McGhee households. The pattern is consistent with the limited medical care available in a frontier and early-industrial river town, where the nearest hospital was in Chattanooga and the iron foundries down on the river produced the kind of casualties an early-twentieth-century town had no good way to treat.

Cleanup history

For most of its history the cemetery had no perpetual care, and citizens organized periodic rescue campaigns each generation as the ground fell into overgrowth. The South Pittsburg Hustler ran a cleanup notice on September 19, 1940 that included a list of persons buried in the cemetery, the first published roster. Reverend Bill and Colleen Garrett recorded burials on January 22, 1986, and that transcription, provided by Euline Harris, became the second of the three documentary sources for the modern record.

In 1999 the City of South Pittsburg formally took ownership of the more-than-twenty-acre property and funded a third cleanup, headed by Ray Evans, who was contracted by the city. The Evans crew marked 330 graves, filled sunken plots, and built a computerized index with photographs of the headstones. The city held an open house at the cemetery on Sunday, May 20, 1999, beginning at two in the afternoon. After the campaign ended the cemetery was again allowed to grow over.

In 2004 the South Pittsburg Historic Preservation Society took up the project after member Susan Mack urged the Society to act. She was named project administrator and led volunteers who cleared about a third of the cemetery over the next year. On March 5 and 6, 2005, the cleanup uncovered a previously unknown section that contained several unlisted and unmarked graves, including a stone reading only "Wilkerson K of P" beside the grave of Joe Osborne (May 1885 to June 22, 1928), both members of the Knights of Pythias, and a double tombstone for Mary J. Barnett (1867 to about 1937) and Joe H. Barnett (1867 to 1945). Neither section had been on the 1999 Evans map. Photographs by SPHPS member Dennis Lambert document the discoveries. In late summer 2005 the Society stepped back from the project and an independent volunteer board led by Susan Mack continued working with the city.

Related

South Pittsburg →
Cemeteries of Marion County →
Religious History →
Civil War in Marion County →
Black History →
Lodge Cast Iron →

Sources