Hyde Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Out here in Wise County, there's a cemetery that holds more questions than it does answers, and the answers it does hold, well, they cut deep. This is Hyde Cemetery.

J. E. Barnes purchased this site in 1885 from P.

J. Hyde and his wife Mary E. Hyde.

That's how the place got its name on the deed, anyway. But the land was already holding something by then. Something Barnes knew all too well.

Because the earliest marked graves here, the ones we can actually read, belong to his wife Dizania, born in 1861, and his son Felix. Both of them gone on the exact same day. December 4, 1879.

Think about that for a moment. The same day. Whatever that day brought to J.

E. Barnes, it left a mark on this ground years before he ever held the title to it. Two miles north of this spot once stood a settlement called Jim Ned, named for an Indian chief.

And in its time, Jim Ned was no small thing. It had a church, a school, a mercantile store, and a post office. A thriving community, the marker says, before 1900.

Today it's listed as abandoned. The early settlers of that lost town, many of them, ended up here. About 75 graves at this site have no markings at all.

Others are pointed out only by rocks and fences; quiet signals that someone was here, someone mattered, even if the name is gone now. Hyde Cemetery is a place where a vanished town buries its people, and the ground keeps more secrets than it gives up.

What the marker says

J. E. Barnes purchased this site in 1885 from P. J. Hyde and his wife Mary E. Hyde. The earliest marked graves are those of Barnes' wife Dizania (b. 1861) and son Felix, both of whom died on December 4, 1879. Many early settlers of the abandoned Jim Ned community (two miles north) are also buried here. Named for an Indian chief, Jim Ned was a thriving settlement before 1900 and included a church, school, mercantile store, and post office. About 75 graves at this site are unmarked. Others are indicated only with rocks and fences.