On top of a mountain near the now almost abandoned town of Lurton in the Arkansas Ozarks...you can see the Tarleton Cemetery sign... on the left side of the road, about two miles north on old Highway 123. As you look past the cemetery sign..on the right is the old Eph Woodard pond, now a ten acre lake... Tarlton Cemetery is a Community Cemetery...about four acres square... in the center of the Daniels family farm.

Near the highest elevation on this mountain, land for the cemetery was donated by the first settler of the farm when the need arose for a burial place for a freed slave who died while fighting a forest fire by her home here on this farm The first settler was Isaac and Spicey Freeman, a North Carolina farm family one of the first to move to Lurton mountain in the early 1800s...

The story goes that the unnamed slave was a young woman who brought her daughter and made the trip from North Carolina with the Freemans...as she did not want to be left behind in North Carolina...One day as she was back in the newground helping fight a forest fire... she drank cold water and caused her death. The grave is marked FREEMAN SLAVE WOMAN, and is in the back corner of the cemetery.

Through the years, Woodard and Daniels families have added space to the cemetery and it has become the Tarlton Flats Cemetery, a resting place for the entire community since this time...

Decoration Day for the cemetery at Tarleton Flats is on the fourth Sunday of May each year...Many former residents migrate home each year like a homing pidgeon. Then, we finally go back there for good when our time here is over. Two of my sisters have been returned there in the past four years. Patsy Ruth Haynes Coonts from Kansas City, Missouri was buried at Tarlton in 1998 and Phyllis Faye Haynes Dennis, from California, in 2000.

Tarlton Decoration each year, is our time to speak of old times and new family members. Cry some, Laugh some, and go home again. It’s a great day... meeting and greeting old friends and neighbors we see once a year.

Hoping to encourage my grandchildren to be interested in family history and to help them know about our departed family members, a few years ago now... we were going around reading grave markers. when Adam, my then four year old grandson, was walking with his mother as she read the markers to him.

One stone was a large double stone for two people. She read "George Boone Daniel, Born 1900, Died 1991," saying, "This was your Great Uncle George. This side’s for your Great Aunt Nellie," reading on, "Nellie Daniel, Born 1899."

"Why don’t Aunt Nellie have this death date on hers?" Adam said as he pointed to the stone with date of death blank. His mother answered, "Because she isn’t dead yet." Adam looked up at her with a horrified, desperate expression on his little face and , dropping to his knees he started digging in the dirt with his little hands as he said,

"Then lets get her out!"

Colleen Haynes Rongey, Thank You for sharing the information and the sweet story about little Adam...