In 1818 three Wilson brothers, John, Matthew, and Samuel, came from Virginia to buy large farms in this area, and the plantations of John and Matthew met near this cemetery. All three brothers and their families are buried here. Inscriptions on two gravestones recount a Civil War atrocity in which, on April 30, 1865, two local Union guerrilla gangs tortured and murdered John Wilson and his nephew, Matthew Jr. Two others in the house were shot but survived, and the plantation overseer was murdered the following morning. Adjoining the south wall, a number of enslaved people are buried from the two Wilson plantations at Wilson's Crossroads, now St. Florian, where there were 160 enslaved people. The graves of Christopher Brewer and his wife are probably here; they were the maternal grandparents of William Christopher Handy, Florence's famous Father of the Blues. Brewer, a freeman, was with John Wilson in 1865 when the family was terrorized by guerrilla gangs, and though wounded, he survived and later led the Wilson heirs to where the family valuables had been buried.