Headstones

The "Bacon Stone" of Sulphur Springs Cemetery in Washington County, Tennessee

One side of this centotaph lists descendants of my great*5 ancestor Jeremiah Bacon (abt 1720-1810) and his wife Fronica (abt 1725-abt 1080) of Berks County, Pennsylvania. Six of their ten children migrated to Washington County in about 1790, when it was still part of North Carolina.

The centotaph does not mention Jeremiah or Fronica; it starts with their children Daunt, John, James, and Polly. (It omits Isaac and my ancestor, Charles.) It lists a total of 56 Bacons, including some grandchildren of the siblings.Many of the spouses are identified only by a last name (e.g. "Thomas to a Barnes - Polly to a Barron').

The other side of the stone has similar information on descendants of Joseph Hartman (1753-1831) and Mary Henley (1747-1834). I am not familiar with the Hartman family.

The origins of the stone are described at at the bottom of the Hartman side. My best reading of that inscription is "Erected Oct 17, 1960 by {someone} Humphreys Brown & other descendants". I have to guess that {someone} Humpreys Brown was a descendant of both families.

Janell Morrow Walker Warden, an intrepid Washington County researcher, and a distant cousin, says:

Dicey Bacon Humphreys may have placed this stone. Now who is buried here? If the stone is correct then some families have been handed down wrong. If the information is wrong especially about the two Isaacs, I can see why they might have gotten mixed up....they were living in the same area. They named their children many of the same names, making it harder to keep them separated.

Well, she's right. The information engraved on the stone is quite different from my information. I would say that well over half of the Bacons in my database do not match the stone. But the stone does, like my data, suggest that these Bacons married quite a few Jacksons, Barnes, and Barrons.

- Robin Richmond
Cleveland, Ohio June, 2020