By Danny Crownover
When Gadsden was first surveyed and platted into 260 lots by W. S. Brown, the engineer who first surveyed the Tennessee & Coosa Railroad (later the N. C. & St. L.) from Guntersville to this city, provision was made for a cemetery in the middle of the block bounded by Broad, Locust, Court and Fifth Streets.
That was in the early 1840s and the block was then in the woods, the main business section being down on the river bluff. It fronted on Broad and Locust Streets and came up almost to Fifth Street, being directly behind the present city hall.
When the town began to spread it was found that the cemetery was in the away of progress and it was decided to remove it. The only way that could be done was to have the legislature to pass an act in 1879 authorizing the removal of the graves and soon afterward the work was started.
The contract for removing the graves was awarded to John Plumkett, an Irish ditch digger who was an artist in his line.
He had small, black boxes about three feet long in which to place bodies but he found mostly a few bones and black dirt.
The graves were transferred to Forrest Cemetery and the Hughes Cemetery.
Old timers will recall that in one grave was found the body of a soldier that was fairly well preserved. In another was nothing but a coil of beautiful red hair, evidently that of a young girl that crumbled when air reached it.
Some of the graves were marked by tombstones. Some were bricked up with marble slabs on top, but most of them were marked only by wooden slabs.
Even at that time many of the buried had been forgotten. It was recalled that before the brick building occupied by the Economy Auto Stores and the Suzanne Shop, erected in 1892 it was necessary to remove 14 graves.
Judge J. M. Moragne, who owned the lot, removed the graves of his uncles, James and Frank Moragne, and that of their mother, Mrs. Mary Moragne, to the Hughes Cemetery.
There were some graves on the north side of Locust Street and east side of Fifth Street, but that was long before the main cemetery was established.
Will I. Martin recalled that when years later the city cut a deep drainage ditch on the east side of Fifth Street from Locust to the N. C. & St. L. Railroad workmen uncovered a row of graves that were really out in the street.
They were in a row, indicating that they may have been the last resting place of soldiers. Some suggested they were graves of slaves or, perhaps, Indians. Nobody around then could recall having known anything about them.
