Corsicana Daily Sun, Sunday, June 14, 1970

Old Ingram Cemetery - Historic, Mysterious

KERENS. There are many interesting stories about the city of Kerens in the early days. One of these stories revolves around the Hugh Ingram property and the cemetery located there. The property on which the cemetery is now located is owned by A. L. Bain and his son, Robert Bain. After a short drive out of Kerens, one turns onto the old Wildcat Ferry Road, that at one time was the only road to the river and was equipped with a wooden tram just wide enough to accommodate the wheels on a wagon. This allowed traffic to the river on rainy days.

It was in this part of the country that Hugh Ingram built his home and raised his family. A short distance from the house a family cemetery was located. A visit to the cemetery is both interesting and sad and leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Inside the thicket that has grown up around the burial ground many grave sites are still visible. Some are as early as 1924 [sic] and some of the dates show the persons to have died in 1871. There are a few grave stones that show the age of the deceased to be in the 50-year range, and one was as old as 67, but [on] most of the ones that are still legible the date of death was at a young age and one is a marker for a baby that lived only about three months. Also buried here are Richmond Ingram and G. Washington Ingram, both of whom served the CSA in Captain Marion Martin's company.

In the heart of the old cemetery there are the remains of an old wall that housed the graves of an entire family. The wall must have been a beautiful structure when it was first built. Some of the markers in this part of the cemetery bear the name Ingram. While the cemetery is interesting it is also sad to see the run down condition that the years have brought to this old resting place of numbers of people and one who visits cannot help but think about the people buried there and wonder about their lives and families.

The man who owned this property and started this cemetery, Hugh Ingram, was a rather unique person in the history of this county. It is said that he owned and farmed so much land in this area that a worker would plow to the river on a turnrow by the noon meal and plowing the row back took until dark. This is in all probability stretching the imagination a little!

In 1947 six men were working for A. L. Bain on his property near the location of the old house, and the plow uncovered some $1,900 in old gold coins that had been buried years before. Bain helped to sell the coins and all the men shared equally in the money. For many years after this, treasure hunters dug a lot of holes on the property, but there was no more treasure to be found.

Notes by Barbara Knox:

The Ingrams, Anderson, Hugh, Richmond and Washington, came from Georgia in 1857 and settled near the Wildcat Crossing of the Trinity River - their community being called Rural Shade. The family is enumerated on the 1860 Navarro census as "Ingraham."

All of the Ingrams had numerous land grants, most of which were located in southeast Navarro County near the Freestone County line. "Ingraham's neighborhood" is frequently mentioned in the diary of Methodist minister, Walter South, who also taught school at Rural Shade in the early 1860s.

Anderson Ingram's will, probated in 1875, named his wife, Sarah, sons, James, Washington and Hugh, and daughters, Mary and Sarah. Hugh Ingram's will, probated in 1880, named children James, Richmond, Mary, Sarah, and Missouri Ella. Richmond Ingram, (aged 48 in 1860) was probably the brother whom Alva Taylor mentioned as the "bachelor brother who ran a small ferry part time....also operated a still, which required so much of his time that he finally sold the ferry." [Taylor's History of Corsicana and Navarro County, pp. 51-52].

Washington Ingram married Sarah Brown by whom he had eight children. After she died in January 1869, he m/2 in August of the same year Mary E. Clements. They had one child, Washington Clements Ingram, born in 1870.