Bynum Cemetery at Maynard's Cove

I said in my last blog that we again visited Maynard’s Cove to find the Bynum family cemetery.  This time we traveled County Road 79 from Scottsboro, Alabama and turned right on County Road 21.  This descended into the cove from the west side and is quite a steep drive.  Just as the road flattens out at the bottom Jackson County Road 533 turns right and leads to the cemetery.  It is a narrow road which crosses a cry creek bed.  The road dead ends at a gate and if you aren’t careful, you’ll miss the gravesites.



There is a one car pull-off about two hundred feet from the gate, we parked  there and found the cemetery on a slight rise on the right.  There were no signs at the turn off from Highway 21 or at the end of the road.  My GPS marked it at 34  45.129′ & -86  06.009 and in decimal degrees 34.75215 and -86.10015

We found it to be in a dismal state.  Many of the graves are only marked with rocks not much higher than the weeds.


Most had no engraving or were deteriorated to the point of being illegible.  Of the few that were, these were the pictures;

This might be a good time to mention when near old gravestones, please do not scratch with them any object or use any compound to try to clean the stone.  Everything I’ve read said that you would do more harm than good.

I’ll include one more that was difficult for me to read. 
I also found a link listing the names of those buried there.














In my mind I would assume that the cemetery is near ground zero for Isaac Newton Bynum’s original home site.  Looking past the end of the road, there is one house and you can almost visualize what it might have looked like in the early 1800′s.  River flooding must have made the cove a fertile topsoil area and springs would have provided plenty of water.

The Bynum family was not the only one here.  The Maynard, Holland, and Proctor families were also early settlers.

It’s difficult to find Maynard’s Cove history on the internet but one interesting bit I found was that the churches were destroyed in a 1932 tornado.  God was obviously important because I found a reference to the Mud Creek Baptist Association being one of the oldest in the state.

There is a quote by Alex Haley which says, “In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage, to know who we are and where we came from.”  I encourage you to look back at your family history and discover the treasures that lie buried beneath the sands of time.