In 1861, as the secession debate raged across Tennessee, Mary Catherine Sproul taught school on the church grounds here and looked forward to a speech in Livingston by pro-Union leader Horace Maynard. After overhearing local secessionists say they would “riddle his hide” if he spoke, Sproul denounced the threat to her students as the work of “heathens and cutthroats” and cried out against prohibiting freedom of speech. Residents then branded her a “Lincolnite,” longtime friends abandoned her, others threatened her, and one man said he would tighten the noose if local women chose to hang her. The secessionists stopped Maynard from speaking, and although Sproul’s school continued, she wrote that her students cast reproachful glances at her as though she had committed a terrible crime. Also buried in the cemetery is Alvin Cullom, a local leader and Tennessee delegate to the unsuccessful Washington Peace Conference of February 1861, led by former President John Tyler of Virginia, whose compromise plan was ignored in the Senate. Sam Cullom, a slave owned by Alvin Cullom, is buried here as well; he accompanied Alvin Cullom’s son Jim during the Civil War and, decades later, was among 280 Tennesseans who received a state pension under a 1921 law for former slaves who served as servants and cooks in the Confederate army.
