About Poplar Grove Cemetery in McLean Co., KY, from US Genweb Archives:
Poplar Grove Cemetery, Highway 1155, McLean County, Kentucky
About 5 miles south of Rumsey
Copied summer of 1999 by:
Glenda Willis, 4558 Hwy 1155, Rumsey, KY 42371
First copied in 1977 by Louise Sandefur Willis
Poplar Grove, formerly called Faith, is located in McLean County, on
Highway 1155. It is in an area of rolling hills and farms with crops and
pasture lands. Going south on Highway 81 from Owensboro, travel about 30
minutes until you reach Calhoun, then cross the Green River, and go through
Rumsey. At the other edge of Rumsey, turn off Highway 81 onto Highway 138.
Travel less than the distance of a city block, then turn left onto Highway
1155. From that point go 5.3 miles to the Poplar Grove Churches. As you top a
hill, turn left onto a blacktop road, and the two churches, the Cumberland
Presbyterian and the Primitive Baptist, and the cemetery is spread out in
front of you.
A log church was built and services were being held in it as early as
1806. It was then called Cypress Primitive Baptist Church. The name probably
came from the creek two miles away which flows into Green River and is called
Cypress Creek. There are still some Cypress trees, with their distinctive
"knees", on the creek.
The log building was used by all the different faiths in the area as a
meeting place. Some sixty years later, since the log building was in bad
shape, the Primitive Baptist built another building about a couple of hundred
feet from the log church, and kept the name of Cypress Primitive Baptist
Church. The Cumberland Presbyterians decided to build a church, also, so
after they organized on November 23, 1870, they bought 4.83 acres and build
a church just a stone's throw from the Baptist Church. The Baptist faces to
the west, and the C. P. Church faces east, with both sharing the same lane.
The old cemetery, the new cemetery, and the Baptist section more or less blend together.
The cemetery was first recorded in 1977 by Louise Sandefur Willis. It
has doubled in the years since then. It was started as a neighborhood
cemetery, and has been used as such since then. Many of the stones are
damaged, and many are broken, lying on the ground, and some are gone. I did
my best to read accurately the names, dates and in many cases, the verses on
the stones. Many verses were just eroded too bad to be read. The names are
together if they are on a stone together. Additional information is in
parenthesis.
There are at least a hundred graves with no headstones, but plainly
evidence of a grave. There are numerous empty areas where there could be
graves, but none are readily visible. The Cumberland Presbyterians sold lots
on their side so they kept records of who was buried where, since the 1870's.
The Primitive Baptists have kept no records that anyone knew about.
There are seven graves in the southern section of the older part where
the "Poor House" (also called the "old folks home") buried their dead. They
had wooden crosses, which have long since rotted and disappeared. The graves
are still visible. One has a metal pipe sticking up at the head, so someone
cared enough to do that. Another grave had a small homemade headstone with
the name S. Webester on it, and is beside the others. Whether or not this
person came from the Poor House, no one I could find knew anything about it.
Many of the older graves have a concrete top with white shells on them.
The shells were gathered from Cypress Creek and Green River, and dozens were
placed in decorative rows in the concrete. Many of the tops have only the
names on them, and some also had headstones with the dates.
Note of interest: Lottie Thomas from Sacramento, who died several years ago,
told a story about when Mahala Baker's grave was dug. To their surprise, the
diggers uncovered two bodies. They knew that two horse thieves had been
caught and hung from a tree in the old cemetery before Kentucky had become a
state (which was in 1792) and buried where they were cut down. They decided
that the bodies were the horse thieves. The story of the horse thieves was
the talk of the community that summer. Nobody knows where they reburied the
bodies.
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