Ray Cemetery – Harrison, Tennessee

Ray Cemetery outside of Chattanooga Tennessee is an abandoned and uncared for cemetery with field stones and unmarked grave sites.

Ray Cemetery. Harrison (Hamilton County) Tennessee
Ray Cemetery. Harrison, Tennessee. An old, forgotten, and neglected cemetery.

Name: Ray Cemetery
State: Tennessee

Ray Cemetery is currently my favorite type of cemetery to discover.  I found this cemetery purely by using an old topo map and my trusty Garmin GPS.  Ray Cemetery is located on an old piece of farmland.  The cemetery is completely neglected and largely forgotten.  I knocked on the door of a couple of farm houses before I found a man who remembered the cemetery from when he was a boy.  He told me no one had been on that part of the farm in well over 15 years.  Though he did not offer to show me around, he welcomed me to walk through his property and pointed the way.

Rarely do I find such overgrown cemeteries.  Ray Cemetery is in a low-lying area of 200 year old farmland.  This particular area is frequently muddy from rain runoff and heavy vegetation means nature is gradually reclaiming the land.

The cemetery was difficult to find in such heavy undergrowth and I was only able to find the cemetery when my research assistant point out a barely visible cattle trail leading into otherwise impenetrable thickets.

We noticed haphazardly placed field stones that we mistook for simple rocks lying on the ground.  Only after noticing an engraved tombstone did we realize that the field stones were marking gravesites.  Many plots were caved in and there were still many more (we assume) unmarked grave sites.

Ray Cemetery Headstone
The only carved tombstone in the cemetery.

 Unmarked field stone within Ray Cemetery, Tennessee

Unmarked fieldstone in Ray Cemetery

Summary
Ray Cemetery - Harrison, Tennessee
Article Name
Ray Cemetery - Harrison, Tennessee
Description
Ray Cemetery lies in a thicket on generational pasture land. With permission from the land owner, I trod across the dewy fields and struggled through thick briers to find this cemetery.
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Publisher Name
www.TheCemeteryDetective.com
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Author: The Cemetery Detective

The Cemetery Detective explores interesting cemeteries around the world.

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