'Gone and forgotten': Berlin woman tries to identify those buried in unnamed cemetery
BERLIN - A small but dedicated group of women have launched a personal campaign to preserve what little remains of a small, unnamed cemetery in Berlin and give dozens of unknowns the respect they feel is due them.
At first glance, the cemetery looks little like a graveyard. There are no mourners visiting lost loved ones, no flowers placed on tombstones. Moreover, there are no headstones here at all. The only thing left of the small community cemetery is a small pile of broken concrete neatly stacked in the center of the plot.
Cheryl Hawkins, who owns a home next to the cemetery, says she put the stones there because it was the only way she knew of to let people know there was something there. When she bought the house in 2018, she says, the entire lot was overgrown with weeds and thorns. When she asked a neighbor about the lot, she was told it was an old cemetery, possibly the final resting place of several soldiers who fought in the Civil War.
Hawkins said she comes from a military family, and while she knew no one in her family could be buried there - Hawkins moved to Cullman in 2011 - the idea that veterans could be buried and forgotten in this way didn't appeal to her.
"My brother came with his brush cutter, and I put on a full suit so I wouldn't get poison ivy and get stuck because the place was just nasty, thick thorns and ivy thickets. I walked in front of his tractor, very slowly, to let him know if there was a grave here, and at that point we only found one," Hawkins said.
Hawkins eventually found several fragments of other headstones, which she placed in the center of the site as a kind of memorial.
The only identifying marker Hawkins and her brother found was the partial remains of the headstone of two-month-old Ollie Mae Critner, who died on Christmas Day 1898. She was the sister of Evie Nell Critner Wright, whose granddaughters, Nancy Kuykendall and Jamie Bryant, had met Hawkins about a month earlier.
According to Bryant, she still remembers visiting the grave with her grandmother to place flowers on the headstone every year during Decoration. She recalled that there were 40 to 50 graves at the time, but most were unidentified, and none of them, other than Kritner's grave, she visited.
"There were gaps between them, so some of them were already destroyed, and the ones that were here had a stone or a simple cement cross or something like that on them," Bryant says.
Kuykendall has spent the last month going through old cemetery and property records in hopes of finding those who might be buried there, and has registered the cemetery in the Find a Grave database as Kritner Cemetery. She believes the site used to be the family cemetery of the Warren and Herren families before becoming Berlin Cemetery.
"I've been told there may be more Critters buried there, which makes sense because I don't believe Ollie Mae would be buried alone, with no other relatives," Kuykendall says. "It's sad that these people are gone, and they should have relatives, but no one seems to know anything about the place except that it's a cemetery."
Kuykendall has compiled a list of people she thinks might be buried in the cemetery, including her great-grandfather, Union soldier John Marcus Critener, who was a personal friend of Cullman Township founder John G. Cullman. They include Sue Schnittker and Lenora Warren Tucker, who was born in July 1881 and died in December 1900. Kuykendall also found records of an infant with the surname Tucker, who she thought might have been Lenora's child.
She said it coincides with her grandmother's stories that many of the graves belonged to young mothers and their babies after an outbreak of typhoid fever in the late 1800s.
Kuykendall, Bryant and Hawkins have also enlisted the help of Berlin City Clerk Kirstin Montgomery and former Cullman County Historical Society President Dot Goodger. Hawkins recently applied to the Alabama Historical Commission to register the site as historic, and together they hope to erect a historical marker or monument to those buried in the cemetery.
"I've been walking through here a lot over the past few weeks and I'm overcome with longing. It makes me long to make things right as I stand in the middle of this ruined mess," Kuykendall said. As you walk through the cemetery, you see the phrase "gone but not forgotten," but these poor people are gone and forgotten. They were once walking, talking human beings just like us, and they need the same respect that any human being would show to their own family."