Historic McWilliams Cemetery in Wilcox County yields up more secrets

McWilliams Cemetery in Wilcox County, Alabama.

In the wake of last week’s column about the historic McWilliams Cemetery at McWilliams, I received a number of e-mails from readers, including an e-mail from Martha Grimes Lampkin, the president of the Wilcox Historical Society.

Martha, a Montgomery resident descended from early Wilcox County pioneers, is the person who spearheaded the effort to have the McWilliams Cemetery added to the Alabama Historical Commission’s Historic Cemetery Register. In her e-mail she provided me with additional facts about the cemetery that further demonstrate its historical significance.

For those of you who missed last week’s column, I wrote about how the McWilliams Cemetery had been added to the state’s Historic Cemetery Register on Oct. 23. This register, which is updated annually, is the state’s official list of historic cemeteries in Alabama, and the commission considers historic cemeteries of this type particularly worthy of preservation and appreciation and therefore deserving of the special recognition of being placed on the register. To date, there are six Wilcox County cemeteries on this prestigious list of historic graveyards.

In last week’s column I also noted that the oldest grave I could find in the McWilliams Cemetery was that of George L. Lamkin, but Martha informed me that there was more to his story. George L. Lamkin, who passed away in 1860, was actually buried in the nearby Schuster community. A relative discovered his tombstone in the woods there in the 1950s, but, unable to move the grave, relatives instead placed a marker in Lamkin’s memory in the McWilliams Cemetery.

Martha also noted that the McWilliams Cemetery also contains a memorial marker for Confederate soldier John B. Lamkin, who isn’t actually buried in the McWilliams Cemetery either. According to Martha, John B. Lamkin was a private in the 42^nd Alabama Infantry and was killed in October 1862 at the bloody Battle of Corinth in Mississippi. It’s believed that he was buried in a mass grave there, and in the 1980s family members placed a veteran’s marker in his memory in the McWilliams Cemetery.

The first burial in the McWilliams Cemetery was actually that of an infant named Willie P. Martin, who passed away on Jan. 5, 1905. Martin was born on July 8, 1903 to W.D. “Billy” and Ellen Martin, who managed the McWilliams Hotel for a time. If you visit the cemetery today, you will see that young Willie’s headstone bears the carving of a lamb, which was common for tombstones of children in the early 1900s, Martha said. The oldest marked adult gave in the McWilliams Cemetery is that of Amanda Caroline Bowman Lamkin, who passed away two days before Christmas in 1910 at the age of 75.

In the end, Martha has been instrumental in getting four cemeteries placed on the Alabama Historic Cemetery Register, and she is currently working on the application for another in Wilcox County that she hopes to submit to the Alabama Historical Commission in early 2018. I hope that in the near future her continued efforts to preserve Wilcox County’s unique history will result in another local cemetery being added to the state’s list of historically significant cemeteries.