Kindness of Man-Hauling Farmer Echoes in Time

The kind actions of a man-hauling farmer still echo in time. Peter O’Neal once carried a complete stranger a half-mile through the woods to find a forgotten grave.

By Chris Bennett

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February 10, 2021 08:52 AM

Standing on uneven ground at the edge of a forgotten cemetery, and blocked by a woolly scrub of intertwined limbs and vines, the old man could walk no further up a Harris County hill and into the woods. Guided by a local farmer and accompanied by a young, female secretary, the old man, a medical doctor, was an excruciating half-mile short in a quest to find the last of his kin, and the final 800 yards may as well have stretched to the back of beyond.

Reading the old man’s despair, Peter O’Neal, a farmer who valued reputation and the assurance of a handshake above all else, and who knew nothing of the old man’s history or plight—other than this momentary snapshot in time—knelt to the ground, tapped his own back, and offered a ride to a complete stranger: “Get on and we’ll go find your grave.”

O’Neal, of medium height and broad-shouldered, hoisted the slightly smaller, elderly doctor, and began piggybacking through the woods, assured of foot through leafy debris, rotting stumps and hidden dips. Casting aside the old man’s white-collar sensibilities to scrounge for a special headstone, the peculiar trio disappeared into the thicket on a fall day in 1980: an office assistant, a city slicker, and a man-hauling farmer.

Forty years in the future, the odd hunt for the lost gravesite has come full circle. The kind actions of a small farmer still echo in time, and serve as a door to the rediscovery of lives too soon obscured. The time-honored adage always holds true: One tale births another.

July 2020: Find the Stone

In late July 2020, the sons of O’Neal (departed in 1990), Robert*, 64, and Victor, 67, hid from the rays of a scalding summer sun, and sat beneath the bows of an old oak at their family farm, no longer a fully functioning ag operation, but still home to a handful of hogs. “Every farm needs an oak tree,” says the plainspoken Robert O’Neal, recalling the scene with a wry smile. “If you have a farm with no oak tree, then I’m not even sure you have a farm, and it’s long past time to plant one.”

Exchanging memories and reflecting on the COVID-19 pandemic in the shade of the tree, the O’Neal brothers dredged up the lore of western Georgia’s Harris County. Ironically, Victor, coughing in sputters, was in the beginning stages of the disease, and unknowingly infected. Despite added complications from diabetes, Victor would go on to survive the virus, but on this June day, surrounded by steamy Georgia heat, his attention turned to the poignant tale of James Randolph Johnson. “I haven’t been to that cemetery for at least 20 years,” Victor stated. “It’s all changed and not so far out in the country. There’s a fire station out front now, but if you go just behind the station and walk up an embankment—it’s there. The Johnson grave is in those woods, somewhere.”

Interest rekindled, Robert proposed a search: “Let’s go see if we can find that tombstone.”

“No way,” Victor responded with flat refusal. “I’m already sick and I’m too old to fall in a hole, and we both know how many rattlesnakes are back in there.”

“Well, I’m going,” Robert shot back. “I’m going to find the stone.”

Fall 1980: Stir of Echoes

On a fall afternoon in 1980, in the corner of a one-room country store a stone’s throw north of Columbus, Peter O’Neal, 60, sat with a group of mainstays, chewing through the latest farm banter. A lifetime path spent in agriculture with a dozen side roads and colorful rabbit trails, O’Neal began with poultry farming and raising gamecocks in Mississippi, back in the day when fighting fowl was legal, followed by an ag education at Clemson University, sharecropping in South Carolina, dairy work in Georgia, and eventually a full Harris County commercial hog operation from farrow to finish.

As O’Neal and his small cadre of locals traded backroad musings in the lazy general store, the screen door swung wide with the entry of the aforementioned old man—Dr. Johnson of Augusta, forename unknown, accompanied by a younger lady, her entire name lost to time.

Dr. Johnson inquired about the location of Mount Olive Baptist Cemetery, hopeful to find the burial location of a distant grandfather four to five branches high up the family tree—James Randolph Johnson, mysteriously laid to rest in 1836, and likewise, a medical doctor. O’Neal spoke up immediately: Mount Olive Baptist Cemetery was only 200 yards from the driveway to his farm.

Ten minutes and a short drive later, Dr. Johnson and his secretary followed O’Neal into the woods below the cemetery, and when the terrain turned to a hazardous tangle, O’Neal bore Dr. Johnson on his back for a half-mile, depositing the doctor to the forest floor when the trio broke out of the thicket and into the relative ease of level ground marked by mature oaks, and dotted with the jutting grays and whites of numerous stone beacons. In short time, Dr. Johnson was standing over the tombstone of the father of his fathers—James Randolph Johnson.

With paper and pencil, Dr. Johnson knelt before the grave marker and took a rubbing copy of the faint etching heavily eroded by the elements, and then recorded the site with a 35 mm camera. Memory in hand, he clambered back onto O’Neal’s shoulders, and the threesome marched away in reverse, leaving the gravesite to silence. However, 40 years later, the stir of echoes has ensured the enigma of James Randolph Johnson, buried 400 miles from home, is not forgotten.

1836: Into the Grave

James Randolph Johnson hailed from Johnson County, North Carolina, and was born several years before the first shots of the American Revolution, on May 18, 1773, roughly sixth months prior to the Boston Tea Party. He and his wife, Sarah Needham Johnson, were blessed with 13 children. In 1836, aged 61, he traveled by horseback to Georgia, to check on his daughter and granddaughter—both of whom had been taken ill from an unknown malady. (Several years prior, Johnson’s daughter had married and moved to the thriving farming community of Mulberry Grove in Harris County.)

Cholera? Flu? Dysentery? Yellow fever? “His daughter had married well and was prosperous, but viruses used to sweep cities and farm country and take people out,” Robert says. “It’s always been speculated that the women caught something infectious and deadly.”

Johnson’s 400-mile ride to Harris County was possibly one leg of a longer journey, Robert contends. Coinciding with Native American removal, westward expansion in the South followed a steady chain from western Georgia to Alabama and Mississippi—and beyond. “Expansion blew up in the 1820s and 1830s, and so many people were going west,” Robert notes. “The doctor’s wife and the rest of his family wound up in Alabama. Therefore, I think he was going ahead of his family to buy cheap land in Alabama, and taking the opportunity to also help his daughter and granddaughter.”

Whatever the cause of the sickness, Johnson’s overland trip and level of concern were warranted: His granddaughter, Sarah, died soon after his arrival. However, Johnson paid the ultimate price to visit, and likely treat, his child and granddaughter. He was next into the grave, passing on March 11, 1836, seven days before his sixty-third birthday. “It’s always been said that he caught whatever his grandchild had, and that’s what I believe,” Robert says. “Yes, it can be argued that he might have died from a lot of reasons, but with the circumstances being what they were, I think he came all this way, got infected, and died here.”

Four hundred miles from home and caught in a tangled logistical puzzle due to distance, there was little consideration given to sending Johnson’s body back to North Carolina for burial. He was placed in the Mount Olive Baptist Cemetery, just feet from his granddaughter. “It was 1836,” Robert says, “and just think what it would have taken to preserve and transport a body. No, they would have known he’d have to be buried here.”

July 2020: “A Damn Subdivision”

Spurred by the under-oak conversation with Victor, Robert called a friend and historical hunting partner, Robert Wright. An intrepid sleuth with a sixth sense geared toward locating the forgotten, Wright operates a rollicking YouTube channel, Sidestep Adventures, (as well as a sister channel, Watch Yer Step: The Sidestep Adventures Vlog) documenting a bevy of old sites hidden in plain sight, lost in the countryside, or at rest on hard-to-access tracts of land.

Following Victor’s instructions, the pair parked beside the fire station, and began scouting the woods, as Robert carried a 4’ wooden stake with Johnson’s basic biographical details penned across the grain, and Wright walked with a GoPro camera in hand. They started at the station’s rear and quickly found the old road embankment, where the depression of a once heavily trafficked horseshoe road remained evident. The once-bustling Mount Olive Baptist Church, long since burned to the ground, had sat inside the horseshoe, and the cemetery was positioned beyond the roadway, to the rear of the horseshoe.

Victor’s description of “changed” ground was bull’s-eye accurate—entirely too correct, much to Robert’s chagrin. “We followed the road,” Robert describes, “and hit a wooden privacy fence. Lo and behold, they’d built a damn subdivision and part of it was on the roadbed.”

The incessant creep of development is reality for countless farmers, and whether viewed as blight or commerce, the advance of urbanization is invariably accompanied by loss, Wright contends. “Two things happen when you see encroachment by the city,” he says. “One is the loss of rural land which is evident to anyone, and the second is the destruction of history, which usually happens in silence. People never realize how quickly the past disappears until it’s too late.”

July 2020: Complete the Circle

Standing in a patch of woods estimated at roughly 100 acres, with roughly 350’ between the cemetery boundary and subdivision, Wright scoured the ground for a sign of burial plots. “We walked past the station, up a hill and saw nothing. Once you leave the tree line, you’re almost in back yards, and at first we weren’t seeing a thing. Trees to the left, houses to the far right. For a moment, I was wondering if they built the subdivision over the cemetery.”

As those testify who walk ground with Wright, the modern-day explorer has an uncanny ability to translate topography. Boiled down, Wright is a bloodhound for a scent of the past. “Sometimes, just before I find something, it’s like a sixth sense is kicking in,” he explains, “but it really comes from knowing how to read land, even on a subconscious level.”

“In the woods, you’ve got to look at tree spacing, rises and drops in the ground, and even particular flowers and plants,” Wright details. “For example, a 180-year-old cemetery might have a non-native holly tree, or variety of iris, or even English ivy, the rich man’s kudzu. Those plants talk, and although they’re not original, they are descendants put in the ground by the very people you’re searching for.”

Despite hope dimming, the first tombstone, 30 yards distant, broke from the foliage blend and caught Wright’s eye. In rapid succession, the cemetery began giving up additional tombstones—almost 100 by Wright’s count. Multiplying visible markers by three as a ballpark estimation of total inhabitants, Wright estimates the Mount Olive Baptist Cemetery might hold 300 graves.

As Wright and Robert continued to look over the cemetery grounds, they knew Johnson’s headstone etching had been barely legible in 1980, and was likely in worse condition after four more decades of exposure. Additionally, although Johnson was buried beside his granddaughter, Sarah, her gravesite offered no location clues—it was unmarked.

Minutes later, anticipation rising, Robert spotted a lone, pale headstone rising from the leaves on the forest floor. Unable to read the inscription due to erosion and the blackening effects of mold or mildew on the white marble, Wright flashed a smartphone flashlight onto the marker, revealing the faint remains of a telltale date—1836. Robert had found James Randolph Johnson, and the precise spot where his own father had carried a complete stranger a half-mile through the woods.

Robert drove the wooden stake into the ground beside Johnson as an identifier for a future visit: “I’ll be back later in the year, after deer season is finished. I want to properly document everything about the doctor and make sure his relatives know exactly where he’s at.”

“There was definitely emotion after we found him,” Wright recalls. “Robert spent several minutes with the doctor, even though he wasn’t a blood relative. The connection of his daddy toting a man on his back 40 years ago is still strong, and it was important to Robert to find the grave and relive the moment. It was his small way to complete the circle.”

July 2020: Fall to the Wayside

History is never stored in tidy packages. Moving away from Johnson’s hilltop grave, Robert and Wright began walking toward the bottoms and the location of a second cemetery, as described by Victor. The older growth trees gave way to clear-cut ground, and Wright soon spotted several white, wooden crosses wearing a bit of age—maybe 20-plus years old. To Wright’s surprise, the bottom ground was pocked with countless indentations marked by field stones, a strong indicator of a slave cemetery.

“Slave cemeteries are steadily hard to spot because there are usually no upright markers,” Wright explains, “and we might not have seen these graves had it not been for the white crosses someone erected in the recent past.”

The plots, according to Wright, were tightly packed with scant wasted space. The concentration of graves, he reckons, held at least 200 individuals. “I can only speculate, but it appeared to be a slave cemetery. That would fit other sites, where whites would be buried on a hilltop, and blacks buried down below. But whether it’s just broke farmers, slaves, former slaves or sharecroppers, it’s powerful to see so many holes in the ground with only field stones as a memorial.”

Robert was shocked by the size of the bottom-ground cemetery. His land and much of the surrounding area were once part of the William “Rich Billy” Walker farming operation, the first plantation in Harris County. “The Rich Billy Plantation probably had 1,000 slaves and that’s a lot of people to bury over time,” Robert notes. “I believe these indentions belong to those slaves and formerly enslaved. Some of them would have gone to the same church building as the whites, but they’d have sat in the balcony. It all fits.”

“I was in awe at the size of this cemetery and I’m going back to do a proper investigation,” Robert adds. “We see a big tract of timber and automatically assume it has always been in trees. No, look closer and you may find graves. Look even closer and you may find that prior to being a cemetery, it was once farmed by sharecroppers, or slaves, or even Indians. That’s a lot of lives out there, just like you and me, that shouldn’t be forgotten.”

July 2020: One More Hunt

If character is revealed through the smallest, unseen actions of an individual, then the man-hauling effort of Peter O’Neal on a fall day in 1980, speaks volumes about the small Georgia farmer. Decades later, his actions contribute to the current documentation of both cemeteries on the high and low ground. “I don’t have the ability to preserve, but I can record so that people’s lives aren’t forgotten,” Robert says. “One of the saddest things is seeing graves fall to the wayside and nobody care. People think they only have a connection with those around them right now, but that’s not true and it shows how quickly families die out and people move on. That’s the way it is all across America.”

Walking out of the woods, despite a morning spent traversing ground blanketed in a 100-plus heat index, Robert’s historical thirst wasn’t slaked. He wanted to find more. Always more.

“Hey,” he asked, turning toward Wright, “you ever hear about the major buried with his sword? You wanna keep going today and see if we can locate his grave?”

Game for the challenge, as always, Wright couldn’t resist another hunt: “I’m ready. Let’s go find this major.”

Another history, another lost account, and another loop to close. Again, one tale births another.

*pseudonym