by Wesley Harris
Douglas Cemetery is a rural graveyard where many of its residents endured simple but tough lives as farmers.
The lack of ostentatious and elaborate markers indicates many families represented in the cemetery lived frugally by necessity. Massive monuments are few and some of the markers are handmade, indicating the economic struggles faced by families who survived only by their own sweat and toil.
Those physical features help define the history of the community. The rocks used as grave markers, and the handmade tombstones express the neighborhood’s history as much as monuments giving names and dates and familial details.
The cemetery lacks the massive cedar trees and other plantings found in many Lincoln Parish cemeteries. Grave markers are mostly simple with little ornamentation and lack the features found in more prosperous neighborhoods like brick retaining walls or wrought iron fencing. A few family plots are surrounded by iron fencing, but not to the same extent of cemeteries like Greenwood in Ruston that contains fewer farmers and many more doctors, lawyers, judges, and successful businessman.
The earliest graves at Douglas date to the early 1850s. The cemetery lies beside what was known as the Wire Road, named after the telegraph line that ran beside it. The families who migrated the area, mostly from Georgia and Alabama, would have taken this road to reach their new homes in what was then Jackson Parish, but later became Lincoln Parish.
In one corner are the graves of several families who intermarried before they moved to Louisiana. The Chandler, Edwards, Liner, and Stewart families lived in the vicinity of the Alabama-Georgia state line around the towns of Edwardsville, Alabama, and Tallapoosa, Georgia. More marriages between the four families occurred once they settled in the Douglas area.
Two Chandler graves are covered with a small pavilion, a rare feature but not unheard of in North Louisiana cemeteries.
The cemetery includes a number of unmarked graves according to records at the nearby Douglas Methodist Church. Some graves are marked by natural stones or crudely constructed markers with faded hand lettering.
The Douglas Cemetery shares a fence with the adjacent Pleasant Grove Cemetery. Many North Louisiana cemeteries are segregated by race. Many such graveyards started as white cemeteries with their slaves buried outside the fence. After emancipation, freed African-Americans were buried beside slave ancestors. Part of the Pleasant Grove cemetery is overgrown with some grave markers, difficult to reach in the thick brush.
Douglas remains an active cemetery with graves added regularly.
Next week: lost cemeteries of Lincoln Parish
