Culture of Marion County, Tennessee

Pine Grove Cemetery

The county-seat burial ground above Jasper, with a Revolutionary War commissioner of the county and three founding pioneer families

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Last updated: May 6, 2026

The Marion County Courthouse and surrounding square at Jasper, Tennessee, the county seat that Pine Grove Cemetery has served since the early nineteenth century
The Marion County Courthouse and square at Jasper. Pine Grove Cemetery sits about two and a half miles northeast on Mel Dixon Lane and holds the burials of the county's nineteenth- and early twentieth-century officials, founding families, and Civil War veterans. Photo via local sources.

Setting

Pine Grove Cemetery sits at 243 Mel Dixon Lane, off Tennessee Highway 28 about two and a half miles northeast of the Marion County Courthouse square in Jasper, the county seat. The cemetery occupies a rise on the floor of the southwestern Sequatchie Valley between the river and the Cumberland Plateau escarpment. The Geographic Names Information System feature identifier for the site is 1297526, on the Sequatchie 7.5-minute quadrangle, at coordinates of about 35.094° N, 85.608° W. Tate Funeral Home, a few hundred yards farther up Mel Dixon Lane at 950, handles many present-day Pine Grove burials and is the practical anchor of the cemetery road today.

Pine Grove is the second-largest cemetery in Marion County by Find a Grave count, larger than every other county-seat burial ground in the wider Sequatchie corridor and second only to Cumberland View at Kimball five miles to the south. The cemetery is active and has interments documented through 2026; the modern operating entity, Pine Grove Cemetery Association, Inc., was incorporated as a Tennessee nonprofit in 2010 and oversees a site whose physical history runs back about a century and three quarters before that.

Founding and the Methodist Episcopal South connection

Pine Grove's earliest documented Marion County deaths fall in the 1830s and 1840s, placing the practical founding of the burying ground in the second decade of Jasper's existence as the county seat. An association with the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, the Southern Methodist body that organized after the 1844 split in the Methodist Church, runs through the cemetery's record. The headstone of Mordecai Asbury "Mordica" Lewis (1820 to 1898) at Pine Grove still bears the inscription "M.E. Church South," confirming that the Methodist connection ran into the late nineteenth century.

Pine Grove has expanded across the years and is no longer attached to a particular church on the same parcel. The 2010 nonprofit incorporation follows the modern community board model that Cumberland View, the Bean-Roulston Cemetery Association, and several other large county cemeteries have moved to over the past two decades.

Captain Alexander Kelly, Revolutionary War officer and county-seat commissioner

Pine Grove's most historically prominent memorial is the 2016 monument to Captain Alexander Kelly (about 1755 to 1838). Kelly was born in County Armagh, Ireland, came to America as an infant, grew up in the Greenbrier country of Virginia, and enlisted on July 9, 1776, in the Greenbrier Militia. He held a captain's commission from 1780 to 1781 in the Greenbrier Militia, served as a major in the Greene County Militia of the State of Franklin, and rose to colonel of the Knox County Militia in the Tennessee Territory. He fought through the East Tennessee Indian Wars under John Sevier, served as the Knox County representative to the Territorial Legislature in 1793, was one of the commissioners who selected and named Maryville as the seat of Blount County in 1795, and was a charter trustee of Blount College, the predecessor of the University of Tennessee. He served as a state senator in Tennessee's first and second General Assemblies, from 1796 to 1799, and was one of the two members appointed to wait upon John Sevier at his inauguration as the first governor of the new state.

Kelly came to Marion County after the territorial era and was one of the commissioners who established Jasper as the county seat in 1820. He married Nancy Robinson, and their children settled the Sequatchie Valley. Sometime after 1824 he drowned in the Sequatchie River, and his body was never recovered. For nearly two centuries no marker existed for him. On May 21, 2016, the Judge David Campbell Chapter of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution placed a bronze DAR marker and a six-foot Georgia granite tablet at Pine Grove in his memory, the latter topped with a Celtic cross in honor of his Irish heritage. About a hundred Kelly descendants from across the country attended the dedication, along with DAR members and elected officials. The project was facilitated by Edwin Zachariah Kelly, a retired Jasper attorney, and his wife Elizabeth Rogers Kelly. The 2016 monument is the cemetery's principal Revolutionary War memorial and one of its most-visited graves.

The Lewis family from the Shenandoah Valley

The cemetery's earliest documented marker by death date belongs to Private Mordecai Reese Lewis (October 26, 1751 to August 1817), a Revolutionary War private of Captain Jacob Holleman's company in the Virginia Militia of Dunsmore County (later Shenandoah). Lewis married Mary Zeigler in Frederick County, Virginia, in 1777, and the couple moved to Sevier County, Tennessee, where Lewis died in 1817. His body is at the Lewis family burying ground in Sevier County, but the Pine Grove memorial commemorates him as the patriarch of the Lewis line that came down to Marion County a generation later. Mary Zeigler Lewis, born 1752 and died December 10, 1832, has a memorial here.

The Marion County Lewis family is anchored by Mordecai Reese Lewis's son, George Henry Washington Lewis (September 14, 1781 to 1860), who appears in the 1850 Marion County census in District 1 and the 1860 census in District 5, and his wife Rebecca Ann Walker Lewis (1790 to 1880). They married in Sevier County in 1808 and brought the family south. Their son Mordecai Asbury "Mordica" Lewis (1820 to 1898) carried the M.E. Church South affiliation forward; their other sons include Charles Kilgore Lewis (1809 to 1882). George's older brother Amos Lewis (1777 to 1856), also a son of Mordecai Reese and Mary Zeigler Lewis, is memorialized at Pine Grove though he died in Sevier County. Together with several daughters and granddaughters of the Marion County branch, the family fills the late-nineteenth-century Lewis presence in the cemetery. The Lewis family is the largest single founding-pioneer presence at Pine Grove with thirty-six memorials, and the family's marriages into the Walker, Mitchell, Zeigler, Wilson, Stephens, Girdley, Pettey, and Rucker lines sketch the intermarriage network of early Marion County in a way few single-family rosters do.

Civil War veterans and the Spears Union connection

Civil War veterans on both sides of the conflict are buried at Pine Grove, with a notable Union-side presence through the Spears family. Colonel Ashley Lawrence Spears (March 29, 1842 to February 14, 1900) is the eldest son of Brigadier General James Gallant Spears (1816 to 1869), the Tennessee Unionist who organized the 1st Tennessee Volunteer Infantry Regiment of the Union Army, commanded the 25th Brigade of the Army of the Ohio, and served at the battles of Stones River and Chickamauga before being dismissed from the Army in 1864 over his opposition to the Emancipation Proclamation. Brigadier General Spears himself is buried in Bledsoe County, but two of his sons and one of his daughters-in-law rest at Pine Grove, making the cemetery a secondary site for the Spears Union lineage. Martha Josephine Pitts Spears (May 18, 1846 to November 23, 1896), Colonel Ashley Lawrence Spears's wife, is buried alongside him; at least eleven Spears burials in total appear in the Pine Grove roster.

Other Civil War-era burials by birth date include Phillip Green Pryor (1832 to 1909), John Elbert Sevier Randle (1833 to 1904), Benjamin Witt Ferguson (1836 to 1897), James Roberson (1836 to 1918), David Byron Rankin (1845 to 1903), John Myers Sr. (1842 to 1927), Thomas Robert "T.R." Harris (1842 to 1918), James Daniel Deakins (1843 to 1925), and James Warwick Snapp (1839 to 1913). The Find a Grave veteran flag covers about a hundred and two burials in the cemetery, roughly five percent of the total, the typical share for a county-seat community burial ground covering a century and a half.

Twentieth-century war casualties

The cemetery holds Marion County dead from each of the twentieth century's wars. World War II killed-in-action and likely combat-era deaths buried at Pine Grove include Private Garnet Buford Cooper (1919 to 1943), Leslie George Alley (1922 to 1943), First Lieutenant Robert L. Brown (1921 to 1945), William A. Hudson (1924 to 1945), Fireman Second Class Aulton Newell Phillips (1919 to 1945), and William Donald Lewis (1922 to 1946). Korean War and Vietnam-era veterans buried here include Sergeant John Ogden Adams, Doctor Charles Marion Conley, Lieutenant Colonel Wayne Wesley Gamble, and Senior Robert Blanton Simpson. The cemetery's modern interments continue and the most recent recorded burial in the Find a Grave roster as of May 2026 is Tiffany Denea Rogers Patrick, who died on May 3, 2026.

Dominant families

Pine Grove's surname distribution is led by the Brown family with about forty-two memorials, followed by the Lewis family with thirty-six (the Mordecai Reese Lewis line), the Smith family with thirty-five (a common-name count inflated by maiden names), and the Harris family with thirty-two. Other large family clusters include Kelly (twenty-seven, the Captain Alexander Kelly descendants), Phillips (twenty-four), Layne (twenty-four), Pryor (twenty-two), Ferguson (twenty-two), and McNabb (twenty-two). Smaller but still prominent families include Hatfield, Hoge, Long, Bennett, Hudson, Webb, Deakins, Roberts, Raulston, Spears, Roberson, Acuff, Walker, Tate, Cooper, Owen, Pope, and Snapp. The Lewis-Walker-Mitchell-Zeigler intermarriage cluster, the Kelly line through White, Miller, Campbell, Gaines, Starr, Hoge, Hornsby, Clouse, Jones, and Alder marriages, and the Spears-Pitts-Brown-Gass cluster together cover most of the nineteenth-century Jasper-area marriage network.

Several surnames closely associated with Marion County's other communities are conspicuously absent or very sparse at Pine Grove. The Pack family of Betsy Pack, the Cherokee-descendant founder of Jasper, is not buried here at all by that spelling; Betsy Pack herself has a marker at the courthouse square rather than a grave. The Coppinger family of Coppinger Cove and Bean-Roulston is also absent, and the Bridgeman and Hargis names that recur in other parts of the valley each appear only once or twice. The pattern reflects Pine Grove's specific identity as a Jasper-town cemetery rather than a Sequatchie-Valley-wide burial ground: each cove and corner of the valley kept its own family burying grounds and only the county-seat-based families and their immediate marriage partners ended up here in numbers.

Related

Jasper →
First Settlers →
Civil War in Marion County →
Bean-Roulston Graveyard, the allied family burying ground in Sweeden's Cove →
Cumberland View Cemetery, Kimball →
Cemeteries of Marion County →

Sources