CLARKSVILLE, TN – American Legion Post 289 membership has taken on a momentous task, which they hope will have great rewards for the local community.
Ernest Schmidt, 2nd vice commander, and Roy West, commander of the new American Legion Sons program. are working on the Needmore graveyard by clearing out an African-American cemetery that is on a parcel of land off of Needmore Road down and across from Glenellen Elementary School.
“I was helping clean out a house for rent when on break I went over and discovered this graveyard, all you could see was four to five headstones,” Schmidt said. “My wife, Dawn Schmidt, and I walked back there and found a lot of trash, even someone had dumped a toilet on the graveyard property.”
Plenty of old gravestones were found, and Schmidt thought it would be a good community service project to do. There were military graves on the grounds. Being with the American Legion, it was a natural process to contact the oldest American Legion post in Clarksville as they maintain a grave registration book for local military veterans buried in the city.
Post 7 Commander Chuck Clark was informed of this location. Clark and Schmidt went to the graveyard and marked and logged the military graves on the site. But many of the graves were very old and without tombstones, so Schmidt contacted the local archives section and learned that Montgomery County Archivist Jill Hastings-Johnson had already done research on the graveyard and that the information was available at the county archives.
West was doing the heavy cleanups of the cemetery and will be installing a sign indicating the importance of the area.
Schmidt has started a Needmore Grave Yard registration book to account for all that are there and he will be indexing the gravestones. American Legion post 289 is hoping to make crosses for the unmarked graves and fill in sunken areas around burial sites.
The Needmore cemetery was started before 1920. It was listed as belonging to a former Black workers union, according to historical records. It is about 1 acre in size with 107 graves.
“I think the cemetery goes back to the 1800s,” Schmidt said. “But records were not really kept back then. When Needmore graveyard opened, more people started burying their kin there, but people left the city, factories closed, people died or moved away, and the time came when there weren’t any people left to take care of the cemetery. This is a historical cemetery and it is being brought back with dignity. We did not have to do it, but by the grace of God we are. Once it’s done, it’ll be the new owners’ responsibility to keep it up.
“We need to get a fence put around it with a gate, and it’s even been talked about a flag pole to honor the veterans buried there. I am looking for any folks who would like to contribute to this worthy cause to contact me through the American Legion,” Schmidt said.