Wilkerson Cemetery Project

We did a service project at the cemetery plot for Joseph Pumphrey Wilkerson and his wife Martha Pettypool - Levi's 5th great grandparents. It was in complete disrepair. Levi, a friend and I spent a hard 4 hours working on it.

We're very pleased with how much we could get done!

Read below for a whole play by play of the activity

If you cannot read what it says in the animated object, click on the image it is showing to open a link to a bigger picture of it. Or click here for before, and here for after.

The Wilkerson homestead is located very near Falls of Rough KY just over the county border in Breckinridge County KY. That's about 80 miles from Glasgow on lots of curvy back country roads. We recruited Levi's friend Jonathon Evans to come help.

We couldn't quite remember exactly where the cemetery was. Cousin Bill Wilson had shown us it a year ago - but we saw so many places that it was all a blur. We drove around a lot and nothing looked quite right. Finally we ended up on Old Railroad Bed Rd. That looked familiar - so we stopped at the first cornfield - parked and hauled tons of stuff way up the hill to where we thought the cemetery would be - only - it wasn't there.

So - we looked and we looked and we looked and we looked. Below is roughly everywhere I walked looking for it (see the red arrows). Levi and Jonathon wandered around all over the place too. We were getting pretty discouraged because we had a time we had to leave by - and it would have been unfortunate to drive all that way (80 miles) for nothing.

Finally after trying the first cornfield and the second cornfield - we decided to move the car and see if there was another corn field - lo a behold there was - and when we saw it - we knew it was the right place - because it had a lone tree in the middle.

We found the cemetery after only 3 minutes of looking this time - it was only 25 feet into the forest. As you can see above it was really in bad shape.


Someone obviously really thought well of the Wilkerson's because they have a very nice plot - with 2 foot+ high walls and a wrought iron fence and beautiful head stones.

Time had not been kind to the plot though. Trees had actually grown through the wrought iron, all the support blocks had been knocked over - probably by trees - it was hard to tell what was even in the plot - it was so littered with dead trees and what not.

See below a montage of pictures of the event.

Jonathon on the south side of the plot
North side of the plot looking south - you can see the head stones and all the trees
looking at the south and west sides of the plot
This is an after picture of wood grown into the wrought iron. It's amazing to me that wood to just grow into the fence like that. We were able to remove all the rest of the wood out of the fence from the 2 or 3 other trees that grew into it. We decided to leave this small piece though.
Looking at the plot after a lot of work to get it back into shape - raking and what not.

Note that the wrought iron fence has posts that go into the blocks. In most cases the posts had split the rock. We fit the heavy heavy rocks back together like jigsaw pieces. Sometimes we couldn't find the missing broken slabs
Sometimes getting things level was a challenge
The slabs were extremely heavy. We had to pry and push a wedge them to get them to slide and move. We couldn't have done it without Jon's help.
We weren't able to remove all the trees
A marvelously preserved headstone! Levi's 5th great grandfather
Martha's is a bit harder to read - but still well preserved



Three tired but happy workers