Jacob Hunter Trust

History of the Hunter Cemetery

The Hunter cemetery is secluded in woodland acres of contemporary Webster County, Mississippi. The graves are in a forested tract deeded at the present time to a timber company in Tennessee. The property and surrounding farmland once belonged to James Alston Hunter, who bought 330 acres from James Bradford, a speculator who had acquired large tracts in Mississippi counties. In 1835 James brought his family from Meriwether County, Georgia, to what was then a promising district in northern Choctaw County. The land he purchased from Bradford, who carried the mortgage, was on the Choctaw side of the dividing boundary separating Choctaw and Chickasaw lands ceded to the United States in the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek.

James’s farm comprised one half of a Section 16 (a full section being one square mile) within its township.  The closest post office to the Hunter farm was located in a community named Fame, near the town of Hohenlinden, both now extinct. Hunter, his wife Martha P. Harris Hunter, and five of their eight children came to the area in 1835 after the cessions of tribal lands [oral family history records they had 10 children, so two must have been born after 1835]. They established their farm near the community of Hohenlinden in a northern section of old county before the redrawn boundary lines created Sumner County, later renamed Webster.

James and Martha are buried in the family graveyard, an isolated, room-sized clearing amid oaks and pines. Their tombstones are the only two markers now present, although depressions in nearby soil indicate that other family kin also may be buried at this site. Earlier markers, likely made of wood, have vanished. The marble gravestones of James and Martha are substitutes for the originals and were placed on their graves in 1950. Factual errors can be noted on James’s, but a nearby bronze plaque corrects them.

The Hunter Cemetery was established on property that belonged to James A. Hunter after his death in 1844.  This Hunter Cemetery is situated in woodlands to the south of Hohenlinden Road and southwest of Crossroads Baptist Church near the intersection of Hohenlinden Road and Mantee Road in Webster County Mississippi.

In 2007, the Mississippi State Department of Archives and History surveyed the site and added the Hunter Cemetery to its roster of Mississippi graveyards that are significant to the history of the state or the community.

The survey coordinates are: UTM coordinates NAD 27 Datum, UTM code 16, Easting 301150, Northing 3729738; Latitude 33  41’ 20.36” N; Longitude 89  8’ 43.04” W.